Some Latex editors (like WinEdt) internally convert your umlauts to Lamport’s umlaut format, e.g. ä \"a
Now, if your editor is not doing it automatically (like Vim 🙂 ), you basically have two possibilities
- Use Lamport’s umlaut format:
\"{} - Use a package that can handle umlauts and all characters having a code > 127
The inputenc package:
The inputenc package recognizes all characters that have an ascii code > 127 and hence is able to parse umlauts:
\usepackage[option]{inputenc}
The following options are available and have to be used depending on your operating system:
- latin1/latin9: Most Unix system and VMS.
- applemac/macce: Older Mac systems/current mac systems
- ansinew: Used on Windows, similar to latin1.
- cp437de: MSDOS.
- cp850: OS/2 and with MSDOS, if the codepage IBM-850 is explicitely used.
- utf8: Can be used on most systems (e.g. all newer Linux distributions).
Difference between latin1 and latin9:
The ISO latin9 character set replaces a few less commonly used characters with characters that gained importance recently. If you need the euro sign € or Caron (háček), which replace e.g. the broken vertical bar (¦) or encoded fractions.