Let's suppose your language is not English but another European language with Latin alphabet that uses special characters like á, ç, ñ, etc. Now, let's suppose you want to prepare some documents, examples and exercises for a LaTeX course. You want that all your documents could be used in any editor+operation systems used by your students. What do you do?
Probably the best solution would be to prepare everything with \'a
, \~n
, ...
But as soon as your students see something like this they'll run away. If it's already difficult that they write with accents having to press only two keys, imagine the result when they have to press three or more keys to get correct symbols.
If you decide to use some encoding (latin1, utf8, ...), how do you ensure that this will be valid for your students system? Do you have to explain iconv
? Should we force to use a particular editor? ...
Could you explain me your strategies against this problem?
utf8
, every operating system can handle it these days, and every modern TeX-editor can as well. Just make sure they are aware of the encoding issue and how they can ensure a specific encoding.\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
and set the editor to use UTF-8