![]() | Setting the Document's Encoding |
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The Kile editor allows you to read, convert and set the text to the encoding your document needs. This allows you to use non-standard letters and symbols; you can use, for example, accented characters for Italian or French. Selecting the encoding for your document can be done in three ways:
One way to set the encoding is to use the encoding combo box, located at the bottom of the Open File sidebar view.
Another way is using the submenu View->Set Encoding.
A third way to set the encoding for a document is to set the option when you use the wizard to create a new document.
LATEX itself understands only ASCII, a very limited set of characters, so you couldn't use accented or special letters directly. To use accented letters, a special syntax was created: such as for example \"e for ë. There is a package to help you with this, called inputenc, and is included in the preamble using \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}, where the option argument is the encoding you would like to use (in most cases latin1). This tells LATEX to translate all of the ë's you wrote to \"e's before compiling. Please refer to the inputenc documents directly for more information on inputenc. Last but not least: remember to make sure that your file is actually encoded in the same encoding you told inputenc!
This host of different character coding tables has been creating problems on many applications: for example, you cannot write a course of Turkish in French without losing one language's special characters. There is general agreement that, sooner or later, everybody will switch to Unicode. There are many implementations of Unicode, and utf-8 is the most successful in Linux; Windows(R) relies instead on the more cumbersome and less flexible ucs-2. Some distributions, as RedHat, have already begun setting their default encoding to utf-8, and therefore you may be very interested in using a utf-8 argument to the inputenc package.
The bad news is, it's not yet included in teTEX at the time of writing this document; the good news is, there is a LATEX package that can do just that, and you can install it yourself.
Just go to the home page of Unicode support for LATEX, by Dominique Unruh from the university of Karlsruhe. Follow the instructions there to install the package and use it.
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