Problems with french accents automatically understood by LaTeX

Question

I am using WinEdt to write my thesis and I used

\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

to get the French accents to be understood automatically. It works fine for the first 2 chapters, but for some reason, when I add more chapters, it gives me this weird symbol whenever I use accents. This doesn't really make sense as the chapters are all joined to the document the same way!

I really can't see what's wrong.

Any idea?

So here's what it looks like:

\documentclass[msc, index, hyperref, prelimtm]{theseUL1_2} 
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} 
\usepackage{lmodern}    
\usepackage[francais]{babel}
...
\begin{document}
...

\include{chap1/chap1}
\include{chap2/chap2}
\include{chap3/chap3}

\end{document}

The chapters are in different files all starting with

\chapter{name}
...

Answer 1

I guess you are using version 7 or 8 of WinEdt. As David Carlisle pointed out, your problem is that, when you create a new document in those versions of WinEdt, they are automatically created in utf-8 encoding.

I suggest to use utf-8 encoding for all of your files.

First of all, put

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

in your main file.

This is what you can do to give utf-8 encoding to the ones that have latin1 encoding:

1. Download the add-on ANSI2UTF8 and install it in WinEdt.
2. Launch the command Convert to UTF-8 from the File menu and select 1252 ANSI Windows Latin 1 (Western European)

Now your document has uft-8 encoding. Repeat the step for all files that have latin1 encoding and then you would be able to compile it.

P.S.

To know which files are in uft-8 encoding and which are not, select Document Settings from the Document menu and then the Format page.

For the ones in utf-8 encoding you will see something like:

For the ones in latin1 encoding, you will see "ANSI" instead of "UTF-8".