To work out Europecv's arbitrary use of utf8x

Question

Egreg about arbitrary use of outfit but using truly utf8x

The europecv class arbitrarily decided that utf8 is not a good option and uses utf8x even if the passed option is utf8, which is of course stupid.

How can you work out the arbitrary use of utf8x in Europecv? Can there be made any changes in the actual package to support utf8, instead of utf8x?

CV is about publishing and it should be in the newest century, like here. I would like also have XeLaTeX support (now only pdflatex, discussion here) for Europecv which can be implemented at the same time and stop the intrinsic loading of inputenc.

Answer 1

The class europecv says

\DeclareOption{utf8}{\AtEndOfClass{\inputencoding{utf8x}}}

which is a very big mistake. At the time the class was first released, utf8 didn't support direct input with Greek, which was the main reason for using utf8x. Since some years, utf8 does support Greek, so there's no reason for keeping the option in that way.

However, for back compatibility, a new option should perhaps be added, say realutf8.

You can coerce europecv into not loading inputenc with the utf8x option with the following kludge.

% trick to fool europecv into thinking XeTeX is used
\ifdefined\Umathchar\else\let\Umathchar\relax\fi

\documentclass[helvetica,narrow]{europecv} % no utf8 option!!!

% undo the effect of the trick
\ifx\Umathchar\relax\let\Umathchar\UNDEFINED\fi

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

<rest of the preamble>

The best would be persuading the author of europecv into providing a realutf8 option that loads inputenc with the utf8 option.