[Tex/LaTex] How to make a given thesis template compatible with German umlauts (error with Unicode char)

germaninput-encodingsunicode

To Thesis.tex (of Sunil Patel's Thesis Template.zip) I added these two lines (to allow for German special characters):

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % my edit
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % my edit

in the

% Include any extra LaTeX packages required

section, tried to compile ("Run" in Texmaker, "Compile" in Kile) and received the following error message a number of times:

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:� not set up for use with LaTeX.

I read (somewhere on this site, can't find the link again just now) that it might help to switch the order around,

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % my edit
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % my edit

so I did, more or less with the same result(s). Ulrike Fischer wrote something about it, but frankly I don't get its import; translation(s) welcome! Is Ulrike basically saying that I can happily ignore both the order and the error message?

Another thing which popped up is this message (in Texmaker):

enter image description here

… so maybe all it takes is to change Thesis.tex from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 ? Or would I need to change the encoding of other files (contained in the *.zip), as well? Anyway, I tried changing Thesis.tex to UTF-8, compiled, closed; re-opened; again it's back to ISO-8859-1 🙁 Going in circles…

Edit

Now I'm trying to use these lines instead

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

Maybe that will do the trick?

It would be so much a great help (to me as a beginner, who's only read/skimmed two LaTeX books so far (a while ago), but didn't get his hands dirty for real yet) if someone could look at the *.zip contents and let me know how to do it right.

Some related Q&A's, which are too technical for me at this point in time:

Error: Unicode char \u8:φ not set up for use with LaTeX

fontenc vs inputenc

Frequently loaded packages: Differences between pdfLaTeX and XeLaTeX

Moving from pdfLaTeX to XeTeX – what do I need to know?

Would anyone recommend me to switch from pdfLaTeX to a different compiler, at this beginners' stage of mine? For now, I'm only interested in writing a short thesis with one or two tables, bibliography, etc; nothing more exotic than that.

PS: If you happen to know of an alternative template which looks pretty similar to Sunil's and is already compatible with the German umlauts, please do let me know.

Best Answer

Apologies in advance; This answer is unfortunately all shell and no TeX.

It seems that you are running some form of *NIX, so you could try and see what the encoding of the file is with

file file.tex

Chances are that the file is in one of the ISO-8859-* encodings, and if so, the file command, AFAIK, cannot tell which part of the standard it is. After consulting the previously linked wikipedia page, you can make a guess (and appreciate Unicode even more).

If you would like to convert the encoding to UTF-8, you could use

iconv --from-code=ISO-8859-n --to-code=UTF-8 file.tex > file-utf8.tex

where n could be 1 or 15, for example. The input conversion is printed to standard output, so the > redirection tells to redirect to a file file-utf8.tex instead.

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