TeX files from Windows file systems mess up Umlaute (Ä/Ö/Ü/ß etc.)

[Ingo Gerth]

LaTeX files that are imported from a Windows file system can not be handled correctly using Ubuntu.

When working with such files, all characters like Ä/Ö/Ü/ß etc. are completely messed up. All of them are replaced by a " � " glyph. When compiling such files, the � are simply ignored and characters are missing in the compiled file.
This bug occurs with editors like gedit, as well as with special LaTeX editors like Kile.

This bug is a very severe one for a great number of students and scientists who want to merge to Ubuntu. The work-flow is completely broken. I would propose to give this a medium priority.

[Ingo Gerth (igerth)]

I added gedit and kile to affected project and LP asked me something about upstream, but I did not really know what to do so I just clicked continue. Sorry about that!

[Stefan Kottwitz (stefan.k)]

That's caused by the different character encoding. Ubuntu Linux uses UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode) but your Windows version is using a different one. You can use tools to convert between those formats, like iconv and recode.
Furthermore gedit and Kile are both able do handle different encodings. With Kile just choose the character encoding during opening or saving a file. The same applies to gedit, it even provides automatic detection.
I do not consider this as a bug and recommend to convert it to a question.

[Stefan Kottwitz (stefan.k)]

It's just an issue of different character encoding, there are tools for conversion.

[Ingo Gerth (igerth)]

That might be, but in that case it would be nice if the concerned tools would inform the user that the encoding is different and maybe even convert it for them. Novice as well as intermediate users could get lost without such infos. After all, this is a very basic feature.

[Nino V (ninovessella)]

Sorry for reopening this topic.
I'm just beginning to use Kile on Ubuntu and I have the same problems with accented characters. I have to be able to use the same files on Linux and on Windows (I'm in a team). It's very time consuming to convert and re-convert each file, so it would be very nice if Kile could deal with accented characters (Unicode) as gedit correctly does. In fact now we use gedit to edit files sent by someelse working with Windows!

[osem8 (tomas-debnar)]

Hi, I would be greatful to have it too. I'm also in the team(some guys work in win some in linux) and need this conversion to be automatic. If you guys can do something about that, it would be great.
Thanks!

[Ingo Gerth (igerth)]

Set the status to "confirmed".