Ways to input special characters (Polish alphabet)

Question

I am thinking of writing a pretty long document in TeXmaker with underlying MiKTeX (I am not sure if I use the terms right yet, started yesterday) and I would like to use Polish letters, like ę or ł. I found a way to do that using \usepackage[polish]{babel}, but using this I always have to type the letters in with some prefix (e.g. "o turns to ó). Is there a package or use of some macros to be able to write the ó in TeX and get the same output?

Here, it is said that some more fancy alphabets are handled by fonts different than Computer Modern. As I am not that used to CM, I could use one of these if any of you knows them.

Solved. Here's the current format:

\documentclass{book}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[polish]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

Check comments for explanation.

Yes, I am using utf8. It is written down in the right corner. — James Pond, Sep 22 '15 at 01:36
Couldn't you define the Polish keyboard in your system? Method of input is not TeX-dependent. E.g. Zażółć gęślą jaźń. — Przemysław Scherwentke, Sep 22 '15 at 02:00
Actually, thanks for the effort guys. I am dumb not trying to find the solution at one of the Polish forums first. This is solved by adding few lines, \usepackage[utf-8]{inputenc} being the most important. I just found so many websites on which people were 'escaping' Polish characters, I really thought this is the only option, but seems TeX has been updated since. Edited the answer. — James Pond, Sep 22 '15 at 02:07
please don't put the answer in the question: you can post (and accept) an answer. — David Carlisle, Sep 22 '15 at 06:46

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 10 '20 at 12:32

Q & A style it is, as you please (hope this at least turns out to be useful for my Polish fellows or other speakers with English not being mother tongue):

Judging by the amount of websites on the Internet in which you can find the dictionary of character to encode Polish alphabet like here, I assumed It might be a little more complicated to deal with the alphabet.

Nevertheless, as it turns out, by inputting these simple lines to your code:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[polish]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

makes you able to write the special characters with usual formatting (alt+character). There sometimes might be a problem when dealing with these characters in titles or blocks, then the encoding dictionary linked above turns out to be useful.

All in all, we can deal with encoding once in a while, but we would not want to write a book encoding a letter at least couple of times each sentence, would we?

Ways to input special characters (Polish alphabet)

1 Answers1