encoding problem

Question

I'm trying to write a program in Python that exports data into PDF. Unfortunately, the well known reportlab module is not available on Python 3. (What a shame.) So I have decided to generate TEX files from the program and compile them with TeX.

I know that my operating system have True Type fonts that can handle all of the characters that I need. So all I need is to use such a font for any UTF8 character in the document. I also need to create some tables and figures. It is that simple.

I was trying to do it with pdfLaTex and also with XeLaTex. I'm not sure what is the difference between them. Here is an example generated file for pdfLaTex:

\documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[hungarian]{babel}
\author{Nagy László}
\title{Elemzés}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents

\section{Esetleírás}

\subsection{A vizsgálat tárgya}

\begin{itemize}
    \item árvíztűrő tükörfórógép
    \item ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP
    \item  80g/m²
\end{itemize}
\end{document}

This throws the error:

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:² not set up for use with LaTeX.

Another guy told me to use XeLaTex instead, because it has better unicode support. I don't understand the details, but I have tried that too. With XeLaTex, I got this error:

Runaway argument?
! Paragraph ended before \UTFviii@three@octets was complete.
<to be read again> 
               \par 
l.7 \maketitle

All right, I have no idea what it means, but somebody told me that I should try putting

%%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode

at the beginning of the file. I'm not sure what this means, because I could not find anything about a special %% macro (???) in the "not too short introduction into latex2e" documentation. It did not help anyway. So I removed \maketitle and now I got this:

 ! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:írá not set up for use with LaTeX.

Can somebody help me where to start? I don't understand the error message, and I don't know how to fix it.

Answer 1

With xelatex you do not want to use inputenc which is for input encodings for the 8-bit tex and pdftex systems, load fontspec then you can access system fonts as shown below using Arial.

\documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Arial}
\usepackage[hungarian]{babel}
\author{Nagy László}
\title{Elemzés}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents

\section{Esetleírás}

\subsection{A vizsgálat tárgya}

\begin{itemize}
    \item árvíztűrő tükörfórógép
    \item ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP
    \item  80g/m²
\end{itemize}
\end{document}

Answer 2

I had the same error, but with \maketitle.

My header was:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article} <br>
\usepackage[left=3cm,right=3cm,top=2.5cm,bottom=2.5cm]{geometry} <br>
**\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}** <br>
\usepackage[portuguese]{babel} <br>
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} <br>

The problem was with \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}. The encoding is wrong. Delete it from the header and put the encoding in Western European > ISO 8859-1 It will solve the problem, I hope.

Answer 3

I had the same problem, in a \chapter command. I just put the title of my chapter in a \protect command, and it just solve the problem...