[Ipe-discuss] Problem with cyrillic letters

[Otfried Cheong]

On 10/22/2010 03:28 AM, a a wrote:
> Please, help me to make Ipe deal with cyrillic letters.
> I use Windows XP and MikTex 2.8.

One word first:  Ipe can only use pdflatex, and it can only handle 
scalable fonts (either Postscript or Truetype fonts).

Currently Ipe writes the Latex source file in UTF-8, but I'm planning to 
change this so that you can select the encoding yourself.  cp1251 would 
be possible then.

> When I type in the preambule
>
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
>
> I receive the error message
>
> ! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:и not set up for use with LaTeX.

I have tried this just now with a small test file:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english,russian]{babel}
\begin{document}
Лeв Николaевич Толстoи
\end{document}

It seems that pdflatex can handle this.  HOWEVER, on my latex 
installation, the fonts used are Metafont fonts, which are embedded into 
PDF as bitmapped fonts.  (You can check this by looking at Document 
properties->Fonts in Acrobat Reader.)

I got exactly the error you describe when I tried to use the correct 
accents:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english,russian]{babel}
\begin{document}
Лeв Никола́евич Толсто́й
\end{document}

I don't know why this is the case, but it seems that inputenc simply 
doesn't know about these accents.

> In all my russian files I write
> \usepackage[cp1251]{inputenc}
> \usepackage[english,russian]{babel}
> in preambule (because I prefer cp1251)
> and latex and pdflatex work properly.

As I said, in the next Ipe version I plan to allow you to write the 
Latex source file in any encoding you want, including cp1251.  However, 
this would not solve the problem on my setup here, as it still uses 
Metafont fonts.   There should be a way to switch to Postscript fonts 
when using Russian, though.

Cheers,
  Otfried