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I have a problem with XeLaTeX. Although German umlauts (äöü) work, "ß" compiles to "SS".

I use TeX Live 2011 on Debian x64.

See this minimal example:

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[naustrian]{babel}

\begin{document}
Das "`s"' in "`daß"' muß (Achtung, "`muss"' schreibt man normal so) einsam bleiben,
könntest Du auch "`welches"' schreiben.
\end{document}

compiles to

Das „s“ in „daSS“ muSS (Achtung, „muss“ schreibt man normal so) einsam bleiben, könntest Du auch „welches“ schreiben.

(You might think the problem is related to babel, but I tried it without babel as well - babel just makes the quotation marks work right but doesn't harm the "ß").

doncherry
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Marcel
  • 891

2 Answers2

26

With XeLaTeX, use the fontspec package instead of fontenc. For details, see Frequently loaded packages: Differences between pdfLaTeX and XeLaTeX.

\documentclass{minimal}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage[babelshorthands=true]{german}

\begin{document}
Das "`s"' in "`daß"' muß (Achtung, "`muss"' schreibt man normal so) einsam bleiben,
könntest Du auch "`welches"' schreiben.
\end{document}
Community
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lockstep
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  • 2
    babel can actually be used, at least for German and Austrian German, although polyglossia is probably better. – egreg Sep 14 '11 at 19:14
  • @egreg: Normally, I don't use XeLaTeX, so I wanted to stick to Phillip's advice (in the "reference" Q+A). – lockstep Sep 14 '11 at 19:15
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    It's very important also to save the files in UTF-8 encoding! But from Marcel's output it seems that encoding was actually used. – egreg Sep 14 '11 at 19:25
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    thanks for your answer! Maybe I'm to stupid, but now I get the error message "! Package fontenc Error: Encoding file `eu1enc.def' not found. (fontenc) You might have misspelt the name of the encoding." – Marcel Sep 14 '11 at 20:59
  • @Marcel: (Assuming your comment is not about Mico's answer) Try to delete all auxiliary files and then compile again. – lockstep Sep 14 '11 at 21:01
  • Thank you! No, my comment is a result of copying your code to my editor. Sorry, deleting the auxilary files didn't solve it. – Marcel Sep 14 '11 at 21:09
  • @Marcel: Sorry -- it works for me, and I'm not a XeLaTeX expert, so I'm out of my depth here. – lockstep Sep 14 '11 at 21:15
  • finally got it - I think it was a problem with file access rights with some of the files in my texlive installation. Thank you! – Marcel Sep 14 '11 at 21:24
6

I think the real problem in your MWE is that you're using the T1 font encoding, whereas one should use EU1 for xe(la)tex -- and EU2 for lua(la)tex. If you change this parameter to EU1, the \ss instances in your MWE will compile just fine: if EU1 is specified, xetex will automatically load the "latin modern" fonts for you. If you're OK with this font choice, you needn't load the fontspec package explicitly.

An entirely separate issue: you still need to load either babel or, better yet, polyglossia in order to obtain language-appropriate forms of the quotation marks.

Mico
  • 506,678
  • thank you - should work, but I get the same error message as i just posted (! Package fontenc Error: Encoding file `eu1enc.def' not found. (fontenc) You might have misspelt the name of the encoding.) – Marcel Sep 14 '11 at 21:00
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    Which version of the Latin Modern fonts and of the fontspec package, are you using? fontspec 2.2 was released just a few days ago; it contains a lot of improvements relative to version 2.1. Page 55 of the fontspec manual has the reference to the EU1 and EU2 encoding schemes and notes that "Now that XETEX can find fonts in the texmf tree, the Latin Modern OpenType fonts can be used as the defaults." I suppose this means that if you don't have the Opentype version of the latin modern fonts, you'll need to to the \usepackage{fontspec} route detailed in the answer by @lockstep. – Mico Sep 14 '11 at 21:28