Unicode text with Pdflatex

Prev

http://tclab.kaist.ac.kr/ipe/pdftex_2.html

Otfried Cheong

You have probably just added a Truetype font to your Pdflatex installation, and this font probably contains many glyphs not accessible through the standard TeX encoding. Here are instructions that allow you to set things up so that you can use UTF-8 encoded Unicode text in your source file. Any non-ASCII character will by typeset using a Truetype font. You can have several such fonts and switch between them, as you would switch between other LaTeX fonts.


this is a rather weak form of Unicode support. Characters are simply mapped to a glyph in the font, using the font's Unicode character map. No special treatment is given to combining characters, spacing, or bidirectional rendering. If you want to write long stretches of text in, say, Japanese or Chinese, you may rather want to look at the CJK package. If you want to use it to typeset German, Greek or Russian, be warned that hyphenation will not work with this approach proposed here. It does have the advantage of being very lightweight, easy to set up for your favorite fonts, handling any script supported by your fonts, and being sufficient for many applications, such as including personal or geographic names or bibliographic references in the original script in your documents.

this is a rather weak form of Unicode support. Characters are simply mapped to a glyph in the font, using the font's Unicode character map. No special treatment is given to combining characters, spacing, or bidirectional rendering. If you want to write long stretches of text in, say, Japanese or Chinese, you may rather want to look at the CJK package. If you want to use it to typeset German, Greek or Russian, be warned that hyphenation will not work with this approach proposed here. It does have the advantage of being very lightweight, easy to set up for your favorite fonts, handling any script supported by your fonts, and being sufficient for many applications, such as including personal or geographic names or bibliographic references in the original script in your documents.

We will now use the Truetype font cyberbit.ttf to render all Unicode characters in our document. The same instructions should work for any font that includes a Unicode character map. You will need version 1.5 of the ttf2tfm tool, supporting the -w option. We assume familiarity with the explanations of the previous section about adding files to your LaTeX installation.

First, put the files utf8ttf.def and ttfucs.sty on . . .

documented on: 2008-06-21