Comments on: Universal UTF-8

By: Joseph Wright

Joseph Wright — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:37:47 +0000

As I said, I’ve never had a BOM issue. However, some people do, so it is worth thinking about.

By: Mark Eli Kalderon

Mark Eli Kalderon — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:16:07 +0000

BOM is not required for UTF-8 encoding. Indeed, UTF-8 encoded documents can easily be identified to nearly 100% without a BOM (for more information see http://blog.macromates.com/2005/handling-encodings-utf-8/). If BOM is making things choke, don’t blame UTF-8, blame your editor for unnecessarily inserting a BOM.

By: Carbon Emacs, SimpleTeX4ht, philosophy und brain_damage, LuaTeX, Blogs « TeX & Friends

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:17:35 +0000

[...] Schluß diesmal eine kleine Blogschau: Joseph Wright gibt Tips, die man beachten sollte, wenn man vorhat, seine LaTeX-Dokumente in UTF-8 zu schreiben. [...]

By: Joseph Wright

Joseph Wright — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 07:12:05 +0000

Thanks for the detailed comments, Marcin. You are quite right about the BOM issue, but I’ve never had a problem with that one myself, hence it slipped my mind. I’ve not really tried amsrefs either, as I have lots of references in a BibTeX database (used for general tracking of references). With care, you can use some UTF-8, provided it is kept away from BibTeX; so no accents in keys, for example.
MiKTeX doesn’t so much have a problem with LuaTeX, more it’s simply not been integrated yet. There are other things that MiKTeX handles much more cleanly on Windows, so for the moment I shall be patient!

By: Marcin

Marcin — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:21:14 +0000

Hi,

first of all I’d like to say `thank you’ for your blog!

As for the UTF-8 problem, I’d add a few thoughts, especially that my mother tongue is incompatible with ASCII.

1. Not using e-TeX really sucks, as of 2008…

2. Probably XeTeX *is* an `obvious choice’; I, however, still use (for LaTeX) a more `traditional’ TeX engine (pdf-e-TeX) with [utf8]{inputenc}. Being aware of inputenc’s problems (it messes with catcodes, and log/terminal output with UTF-8 is rather garbled), I’m ok with it. I’ll consider switching to XeTeX, too. When using ConTeXt, I use luaTeX. (encTeX is another option, btw.)

3. Does luaTeX really have problems with MikTeX? If yes, maybe that’s another reason to switch to texlive?

4. BibTeX sucks. Really. *Do* use amsrefs instead. (Or maybe some kind of a replacement for BibTeX, there are a few; having amsrefs, I’ve never needed them.)

5. You didn’t mention another problem with UTF-8: the infamous BOMs. (I use Linux almost exclusively, and convert to CP-1250 when going Windows at work, so it’s not a problem for me;).)

6. As for data interchange, CP-1250 is probably a reasonable choice when working with Polish-speaking Windows people; Emacs (and vim, too) have no problems with it. Emacs even parses the LaTeX file to find an inputenc-loading line, checks the encoding and acts accordingly.

Greets