How can I use german umlauts in MetaUML

Question

I have the following files:

metaumlfile.mp:

input metauml;
beginfig(1);
    Class.Benutzer("Benutzer")
           () 
           ("+üben(): void");

    drawObjects(Benutzer);
endfig;
end

latexfile.tex:

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % this is needed for german umlauts
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel} % this is needed for german umlauts
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}    % this is needed for correct output of umlauts in pdf
\usepackage[margin=2.5cm]{geometry} %layout

% The following is needed in order to make the code compatible
% with both latex/dvips and pdflatex.
\ifx\pdftexversion\undefined
\usepackage[dvips]{graphicx}
\else
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\DeclareGraphicsRule{*}{mps}{*}{}
\fi

\begin{document}
\includegraphics{metaumlfile.1}
\end{document}

Makefile:

make:
    mpost metaumlfile.mp
    pdflatex latexfile.tex -output-format=pdf
    pdflatex latexfile.tex -output-format=pdf
    make clean

clean:
    rm -rf  $(TARGET) *.class *.html *.log *.aux *.out *.glo *.glg *.gls *.ist *.xdy *.1 *.toc

(I hope this still works. I have a much larger file and tried to generate a minimal example. My large file compiles when I call make.)

In metaumlfile.mp is a special character called "umlaut". What do I have to change to get it displayed correctly in my PDF file? (I can use umlauts in my latexfile.tex.)

Answer 1

It's clearly an encoding problem; MetaUML doesn't really understand TeX input and doesn't like UTF-8 at all.

If you save the .mp file as Latin-1 you have a chance that the special characters are correctly rendered, as Latin-1 and the font used by MetaUML share many slots (the ü is among them).

Here's the result from the MetaUML file encoded as Latin-1: