Tabular LaTeX Missing: Understanding Encoding and Special Characters

In this chapter, we will delve into the world of encoding and special characters in LaTeX. The majority of users are within the mathematical domain, and later chapters will cover how to access these special characters.

To begin with, it is essential to tell LaTeX that your source file is encoded in UTF-8. This can be achieved by configuring PuTTY to use UTF-8, as it is not set to do so by default. Some old Unix terminals may not support UTF-8, so it's crucial to ensure your terminal supports input and output in UTF-8.

In addition, most text editors do not make the distinction between encoding and saving files, but some do, such as Notepad++. Make sure your text editor saves your file in UTF-8 and decodes it accordingly. There are important steps to specify encoding, and in this chapter, we will assume you want to use UTF-8.

UTF-8 supports the complete Unicode specification, which is a significant improvement over previous encodings. It can handle most characters for Latin languages but has limitations when it comes to non-English languages. LaTeX offers several encodings, including ASCII, ISO 8859-x, and others.

However, if you want accents and other special characters to appear directly in the source file, you need to tell TeX that you want to use a different encoding. This can be achieved using commands for every diacritical marking (see Escaped codes). Unfortunately, this means that only 128 characters are available for non-English languages.

There are specific rules for producing characters with diacritical marks in text mode, math mode, or the tabbing environment. These rules will be discussed in more detail in the Internationalization chapter. Some languages require a dedicated input system to ease document writing, such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and others.

In this chapter, we will focus on matters related to input encoding, typesetting diacritics, and special characters. For additional information on encoding, please refer to the Fonts chapter.

It's worth noting that lualatex and xelatex accept Unicode input and can usually typeset documents using the correct glyphs without further user intervention. However, this chapter assumes you are using the latex or pdflatex engines and need to concern yourself with TeX's various encodings.

In summary, understanding encoding and special characters in LaTeX is crucial for producing high-quality documents. By following these guidelines, you can ensure that your documents look professional and accurately represent the content you intend to convey.

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