Wrong diacritic when using \"u

Question

I have a document where the \"u is not rendered as ü, but more like a u with a strikethrough mark:

Directly using the UTF-8 encoded ü character in the input file works as expected, however. I have the following classes/packages loaded (all with their default options, in this order):

• letter
• ifthen
• graphicx
• lastpage
• fontenc
• ragged2e
• ngerman
• hyperref

Anybody knows what could be the cause of this issue?

Answer 1

Tricky problem. The issue is the following:

In your class file you define a number of "fixed fonts".

\DeclareFixedFont{\x}{T1}{phv}{m}{n}{10}
\DeclareFixedFont{\xb}{T1}{phv}{b}{n}{10}
\newfont{\xiiiv}{phvr8t at 8.5pt}
\newfont{\xiiivb}{phvb8t at 8.5pt}

But this is wrong in several respects.

• \newfont is not a LaTeX interface since 1994 (LaTeX2e) it is really only there for compatibility with 2.09 documents it should be \DeclareFixedFont throughout
• However, \DeclareFixedFontis not meant to load fonts for general typesetting. It gives you a font, right, but it doesn't set up the machinery to get all the special symbols autmatically choose the right slots. All that needs to be done by yourself in that case.

\DeclareFixedFont means that you load a font in a particular encoding in a particular size, but LaTeX afterwards doesn't know anything about this font. So all the hard work that automatically makes \"u select the right glyph or produce and accent on top of some glyph, etc. is not available.

Thus what happens is that LaTeX thinks it is typesetting in OT1 encoding (which means \"u produces an accent on top of u) while in reality the \closing command called \x (a T1 font). So it picks up the umlaut from the OT1 position (but in T1 there is this bar in this slot) and happily positions this on top of u.

So bottom line, forget about \DeclareFixedFontif you want to typeset general text and you don't know what diacritics come along and instead use the somewhat slower

\fontsize{10}{12}\usefont{T1}{phv}{m}{n}

but then you have all diacritics set up correctly.