How to type special/accented letters in LaTeX?

Question

How to type these special letters from European languages in latex? ä, é, and L'?

Answer 1

You can type texdoc lshort in a command line (Command Prompt on Windows, Terminal on Linux/Mac OS X). Then have a look at Table 2.2 in Section 2.4.8. I'll quote it for you here.

Answer 2

With pdfLaTeX

Save your file as UTF-8 and put

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % usually not needed (loaded by default)
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

in your preamble. With current (>2018) distributions inputenc is no longer needed if the file is UTF-8, as that is the assumed default encoding.

Then you can just type the characters normally into your source file.

With XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX

ALternatively you can use XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX which accept UTF-8 input natively. In that case you need to add only:

\usepackage{fontspec}

to your preamble. You should not load inputenc (or fontenc) in this case. These engines allow you to use any font installed on your system. See the fontspec documentation for more details.

Lousy editor

If your text editor doesn't support UTF-8 encoded files, you should probably get another editor. But if you're stuck with one, you can also use:

\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} % for PCs
\usepackage[applemac]{inputenc} % for Macs

and save the files in the default encoding for your machine. You cannot use XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX with such files, however.

Answer 3

Users looking to make common accents in regular text mode can do so with, for example, \'e.

MWE:

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\begin{document}
Alfred Land\'e.
\end{document}

Output:

Answer 4

You can use Detexify. Just draw your symbol, and it will figure out what you need to type! Much easier than plowing through endless symbol tables :).

Answer 5

The package selinput was not yet mentioned. Because I found good answers regarding its use on other places in TeX.SX let me first link to them:

• Heiko Oberdiek (author of selinput):

  The input encoding depends on the editor that is used to write the TeX file … If the user is troubled to find the right encoding, then package selinput can help, …
  (Encoding problems with custom LaTeX class (only on Windows 7/8). Why?)

• Thorsten Donig:

  For languages other than English you can choose a semiautomatic input selection. … The selinput package is part of the oberdiek bundle. It will select the right input encoding in dependence of the file encoding.
  (German character not rendered to pdf)

  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.
  (How to use spanish accents?)

The hardest part can be to find out, what has actually to be written in \SelectInputMappings, read the package documentation for this. You are not forced to add every letter not in ASCII range, but you have to add some distinctive characters for your language. Below I added the letters from question.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{selinput}
\SelectInputMappings{%
  adieresis={ä},
  eacute={é},
  Lcaron={Ľ},
}

\begin{document}
äéĽ
\end{document}

Answer 6

Maybe a short hint for the German users: If you want to get an é (e accent acute), you don't write \´e (this is the accent key between ß and BACKSPACE), as you would do in e.g. a text-based program like Microsoft Word. You have to write \'e (this is the apostrophe key, SHIFT + #).

This could also apply for all keyboards with the dedicated accent keys, probably also french or spanish (requires more research). Not the US-one as there is a key for ~ = SHIFT + `.