Affiliation:	Full-time Professor, Computer Science Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble
	Address:	Projet Sardes INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes Inovallée - 655 avenue de l'Europe  38330 Montbonnot - St Martin (France)
	Phone:	+33 4 76 61 52 68
	Fax:	+33 4 76 61 52 52
	E-mail:	firstname dot lastname at inria dot fr

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PDF and Accents

So for instance, I discovered that Suse and RedHat are on UTF-8 locale, by default. Using emacs, encoding on UTF-8, I can do a "more myfile.tex" and I can see the accents (meaning the characters with the accent such as é or à). Using pdflatex, I can generate a PDF file. Using acroreader, I can see the document, but all accentuated characters have disappeared.

Pdflatex uses the locale to know what to generate... don't ask me why PDF is sentitive to a locale... I don't have a clue. So you need to switch to a latin-1 locale, this is how I do it on Suse, typed at the shell prompt:

$ LANG=iso_8859_1

Then, miraculously, acroread shows the accentuated characters in my document... Notice that this is independent of the encoding of the original tex document (which is in my case still UTF-8).

To see your locale, you can try on may systems the following command:

$ env | egrep "LC|LANG"

By the way, evince works in either case... It is a bug in Acrobat Reader, but since almost everyone reads PDF documents using Acrobat Reader, I feel it is important that we generate PDF documents in the iso-8859-1 locale or equivalent.