Hyphenation of words with accents doesn't work

Question

Hyphenation of words with accents doesn't work. I'm writing my document in Portuguese so I have accents like '`~^ for some words but these words are not hyphenated. How do I solve this?

THIS WAS SOLVED BY: (1) updating my texlive installation. (2) adding the lines

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

to my document. Actually the last line is not necessary but the text font would be too ugly without it.

Answer 1

(too long for a comment, hence posted as an answer)

The inability of TeX (and LaTeX, etc) to hyphenate words with accents -- if the accented words were constructed using accenting primitives and if the font encoding is the "original" or "old" TeX encoding -- has been known for a long time.

What to do? You should (a) if at all possible input the accented words directly, e.g., as adiabática, (b) use any font encoding other than OT1 (which, as you can probably guess, is the original font encoding method), and (c) load the babel or polyglossia packages with the appropriate language choices.

The MWE below was compiled using LuaLaTeX; if compiled under pdfLaTeX the first word would not get hyphenated. (That's a different shortcoming...)

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{ifluatex}
\ifluatex
  \usepackage{fontspec}
\else
  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\fi
\usepackage[portuguese]{babel}
\setlength\textwidth{1mm} % to force the use of every possible hyphenation point

\begin{document}
\noindent
adiabática adiabática
\end{document}