[CentOS] Text file encoding

Fri Sep 26 14:41:33 UTC 2014
Peter Eckel <lists at eckel-edv.de>

Hi Patrick, 

>   iconv -f MACINTOSH -t ISO8859-15 file.bib.mac >file.bib
>   iconv -f ISO8859-15 -t MACINTOSH file.bib >file.bib.mac
> 
> But it is a little tedious to work like this...
> 
> Runing pdflatex (in CentOS) on these files written on apple laptops works fine with
> 
>   \usepackage[applemac]{inputenc}
> 
> So the main problem is an editor problem. I've tried several ones (nedit, gedit, kate, vim...) none of them seams to support this encoding. But may be it is a configuration problem ?
> 
> Any idea ?

Use UTF-8 on all platforms. 

Most ediors on the Mac, among them the predominant LaTeX editor for Mac OS X, TeXshop, can (and should) be set to use UTF-8 as the default encoding, and if exchanging textual data between platforms is an issue, UTF-8 (or -16) is the only sensible solution. 

Opening files with language specific characters such as German Umlauts in Linux is no problem if the files have been encoded as UTC-8 and UTF-8 is set as the locale on Linux.

Cheers, 

  Peter.