No Norwegian characters in LaTeX

Question

I translated the document from English into Norwegian in LaTeX format, and when using special characters from Norway I get an error message using

\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} 

to try to display Norwegian (Scandinavian) special characters in PostScript / PDF / DVI format, saying

  Package utf8x Error: MalformedUTF-8sequence. 

So, until this worked, I tried another possible solution:

 \usepackage{ucs} \usepackage[norsk]babel 

And when I tried to save this in Emacs, I get this message:

 These default coding systems were tried to encode text in the buffer `lol.tex': (utf-8-unix (905 . 4194277) (916 . 4194245) (945 . 4194278) (950 . 4194277) (954 . 4194296) (990 . 4194277) (1010 . 4194277) (1013 . 4194278) (1051 . 4194277) (1078 . 4194296) (1105 . 4194296)) However, each of them encountered characters it couldn't encode: utf-8-unix cannot encode these: \345 \305 \346 \345 \370 \345 \345 \346 \345 \370 ... 

Thanks to Emacs, I have the opportunity to check the properties of these characters, and the first one tells me:

 character: \345 (4194277, #o17777745, #x3fffe5) preferred charset: eight-bit (Raw bytes 128-255) code point: 0xE5 syntax: w which means: word buffer code: #xE5 file code: not encodable by coding system utf-8-unix display: not encodable for terminal 

Which doesn't tell me much. When I try to build it with texi2dvi -dvipdf filename.text, I get a perfectly fine PDF file, without any special Norwegian-style characters.

When I am going to save Emacs, also ask me: “Select the encoding system (default source):” And I type utf-8 to select my encoding system. I also tried to select the default source to see if I got a different result. But nothing.

Finally I tried \ lstset {inputencoding = utf8x, extendedchars = \ true} ... the code that I came across while Google was trying to solve this problem. Which gives me this error: Undefined.

Basically, I tried every encoding parameter that I managed to find, and nothing works. I am desperate to make this work, as the Norwegian translation must be published before the deadline.

As additional information, I can add that I later found out that I only had en_US.UTF-8 in my locale, so I added nb_NO.UTF-8 and nb_NO.ISO-8859-15 and ran localegen + reboot without any changes.

Hope I have provided enough information to get help, the characters in question are æ ø å.

Answer 1

It seems your emacs hardly save the file as UTF-8 (which doesn’t make much sense, since it should be able to represent all characters using this encoding). You should try using a different multi-encoding editor to save the file as UTF-8.

Until you can save the file in UTF-8, LaTeX will not be able to read it correctly unless you specify your current file encoding as the inputenc package parameter. You can try, for example, to save the file as it is in emacs, but by specifying \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} , which should do the trick if emacs writes the file using something in the * iso-8859 - ** family.

Answer 2

I solved this error by setting up an encoding system to save the file:

 Cx Cm f utf-8-unix