Digital Typography Using LaTeX
by A. Syropoulos, A. Tsolomitis, N. Sofroniou


How to work with Unicode editors


Most operating systems today have keyboard drivers and editors that can write text using the ISO standard. For these systems (that include GNU-Linux systems, Solaris, Windows) there is no problem using texts encoded according to the ISO standards. However there are some systems, most notably, MacOSX, on which it is extremely difficult to set them up for writing such texts, but on the other hand they can easily save text files in the UTF8 encoding. The purpose of this short article is to show how to use the multilingual features of Babel on such systems. Assume that you want to write Greek on MacOSX. TeXshop can be configured to use the utf8 encoding by default. All we need is to have the following preample

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[greek]{babel}
\usepackage{ucs}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\begin{document}


This preample will make everything work, provided that your system has all the required packages (babel with greek, ucs, inputenc).

If the fonts you are using come from metafont sources then they will look ugly on the previewer. In this case try to use a Type1 font (for example the Kerkis FontFamily).



Working with people that use standard ISO encodings

If you want to exchange LaTeX files with people working with standard ISO encodings, note that your unicode files, setup as above, will perfectly work on their systems. However, if they want to make changes they will have (them or you) to convert the file. Different tools exist for different languages. For example, for Greek there is a tool named grconv which can easily convert back and forth from Unicode to ISO-8859-7. You can find this tool here. The author provides binaries for Unix and Windows systems but if you need it for MacOSX you can compile it from the provided source.



A. Tsolomitis, A. Syropoulos.
10 Dec 2003