[Nix-dev] Latex package to handle unicode characters?

[Linus Arver]

On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 04:56:12PM -0700, Jeffrey David Johnson wrote:
> I get the following error when exporting some markdown to PDF with pandoc:
> 
>     An error occured: PDF creation failed:
>     ! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:  not set up for use with LaTeX.
> 
>     See the inputenc package documentation for explanation.
>     Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
>      ...                                              
>                                                   
>     l.150   Evolutionary Analysis}
> 
>     Try running pandoc with --latex-engine=xelatex.
> 
> I could hunt this one character down, but is there a package I could add to my texlive environment that might help handle this type of problem in general?

I used to use the texliveFull package, which included xelatex.

FWIW, I no longer use texliveFull; instead I use a Docker container for
all TeX-related things as it is much simpler to use along with
negligible maintenence costs, if at all.

> So far I just use the standard one:
> 
>     myTexLive = texlive.combine {
>       inherit (texlive) scheme-small;
>     };
> 
> Don't see any mention of xelatex in nixpkgs.

That's probably because it still comes with texliveFull, which is what
most people use I imagine.

> Ideally I'd like to handle all of unicode, but just skipping any unrenderable characters would be OK too, since I gather latex doesn't do that yet?

AFAIK, Latex never dealt with Unicode natively. Xelatex has much simpler
font support (fontspec) so I've always opted for Xelatex from the beginning.

Best,
Linus