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I am trying to type the word Łojasiewicz. What is the proper command to code the polish character Ł?

Thank you for your help.

clark
  • 243

3 Answers3

19

The traditional markup (going back to plain TeX) is \L in current releases you can simply use Ł

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

Ł 

\end{document}

Prior to the 2018 LaTeX release you would need to explicitly load inputenc as shown below to be able to enter it as is. fontenc makes it one character but is not necessary to input it (it'll get displayed by a character "L" and an overlapping dash without fontenc). As noted in the comments \L is the underlying macro that is used for the character, so you could also use \L in every occurrence of Ł.

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
%\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\begin{document}
Ł
\end{document}

Without fontenc:enter image description here

With fontenc:enter image description here

If you're using XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX you don't need the inputenc packages as they are unicode enabled by default.

David Carlisle
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Skillmon
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  • Funny thing happened I had the package \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} with % in front because I did not know what it was about. It worked thank you. – clark Dec 14 '17 at 14:57
  • 5
    You can use \L too. –  Dec 14 '17 at 14:59
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    inputenc always translates to the underlying ascii markup version so you never need inputenc, although it might be more convenient. \L is defined even in plain TeX. – David Carlisle Dec 14 '17 at 15:12
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    Note that LuaLaTeX and XeTeX work directly with utf-8 encoding. If you compile with either of those and the required fontspec package, you can simply paste the character directly from a Unicode character map. –  Dec 14 '17 at 15:23
15

Quick answer:

\L{} or \l{}

Reference: https://latex.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2239

user193679
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5

For example, you can type:

Łojasiewicz
\bye

and use the command csplain or pdfcsplain to process the document.

wipet
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