How to use spanish accents?

Question

I'm trying to add spanish accents to my document ( my Thesis )

\documentclass[11pt, spanish]{report}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\selectlanguage{spanish}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}

    Hola! Cómo estás ?

\end{document}

This piece of code doesn't seem to work on my Mac ( OS X Lion ), And I get:

Hola! Cmo ests?

in the pdf output.

Any ideas ?

Answer 1

You could choose another way of input encoding by the selinput package from the oberdiek bundle. It chooses the right encoding by some glyphs from your language correspondingly to the encoding of the source file.

\documentclass[11pt,spanish]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{selinput}
\SelectInputMappings{%
  aacute={á},
  ntilde={ñ},
  Euro={€}
}
\usepackage{babel}

\begin{document}
  Hola! Cómo estás ?
\end{document}

Answer 2

Gando, I just compile this code with pdflatex in an iMac (Mountain Lion OS X):

\documentclass[11pt, spanish]{report}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\selectlanguage{spanish}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}

¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás?

\end{document}

and got this output:

But you can get the same result with:

\documentclass[11pt]{report}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}

¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás?

\end{document}

Answer 3

You can also use escape codes for any accent you want to make. In general, it might be easier to fix the encoding once than have to escape every accented character, but for the occasional foreign name I use the table here http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Special_Characters.

Specifically, I would write:

!`Hola!, ?`c\'{o}mo est\'{a}s?

Do note, that with the letter i a dotless version needs to be used, as otherwise in addition to the accent, the regular i dot would be rendered.

S\'{\i}.

Note, to get the initial question mark and exclamation point, you type a backtick character immediately after.

Answer 4

Try this:

\documentclass[11pt, spanish]{report}

\usepackage[spanish]{babel}

\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

\begin{document}

    Hola! Cómo estás ?

\end{document}

It should work with the additional package

Answer 5

If possible, I would \usepackage{fontspec} rather than the legacy 8-bit fonts from the ’90s that you get with \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, much less the 7-bit fonts from the 1980s that you get by default. This allows you to use any of your system fonts, or any OpenType or TrueType font, in Unicode.

For your input encoding, I would save any new files as UTF-8. This has been the default encoding of LaTeX since 2018.

Compile with either XeLaTeX or LuaLateX. (I personally like to use \usepackage{microtype} with LuaLateX.)

So:

\documentclass[11pt, spanish]{report}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}

\defaultfontfeatures{ Scale = MatchUppercase, Ligatures = TeX }
% Set your fonts of choice here with either `\setmainfont`,
% `\babelfont`, or an OTF font package.

\begin{document}

¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás?

\end{document}

Answer 6

For avoid that problem try this:

\documentclass[11pt]{report}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}    
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\begin{document}

    ¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás?

\end{document}

If this doesn't compile right then perhaps the problem are not in the packages or the codification.

Answer 7

If you use ConTeXt MKIV, such things work out-of-the-box.

\starttext

¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás?

\stoptext

Answer 8

1 - apt install tex-lang-european

2 - Same @Thorsten Donig answer with little change

\documentclass[latin]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{selinput}
\SelectInputMappings{%
  aacute={á},
  ntilde={ñ},
  Euro={€}
}
\usepackage{babel}

\begin{document}
  Hola! Cómo estás ?
\end{document}