Using Unicode in fancyvrb’s VerbatimOut

Question

Problem

VerbatimOut from the “fancyvrb” package doesn’t play nicely with UTF-8 characters.

Minimal working example:

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{fancyvrb}

\begin{document}
\begin{VerbatimOut}{\jobname.test}
é
\end{VerbatimOut}

\input{\jobname.test}
\end{document}

Error message

When compiled using pdflatex mini, this gives the error

File ended while scanning use of \UTFviii@three@octets.

A different error occurs when the sole occurrence of é above is replaced by something else, e.g. é */:

Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:### not set up for use with LaTeX.

– indicating that in this case, LaTeX succeeds in reading a multi-byte UTF-8 character, but not knowing what to do with it (i.e. it’s the wrong character).

In fact, when I open the produced .test file manually, it contains the character é, but in Latin-1 encoding!

Proof: when I open the files in a hex editor, I get the following:

• Original file: C3 A9 (corresponds to LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE in UTF-8)
• Written file: E9 (corresponds to é in Latin-1)

Question

How to set VerbatimOut up correctly?

filecontents* (from “filecontents”) shows that it can work. Unfortunately, I don’t understand either code so I cannot fix fancyvrb’s code by replicating the logic from filecontents manually.

I also cannot use filecontents* instead of VerbatimOut because the former doesn’t work within a \newenvironment, while the latter does.

(Oh, by the way: vanilla Verbatim instead of VerbatimOut also works as expected. The error seems to occur when writing the file, not when reading the verbatim input)

Answer 1

Is your end goal to write symbols and accents in Verbatim? Because you can do that like this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fancyvrb}
\begin{document}
\begin{Verbatim}[commandchars=\\\{\}]
\'{e} \~{e} \`{e} \^{e}
\end{Verbatim}
\end{document}

The commandchars option allows the \ { } characters to work as they normally would.

Source: http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/fancyvrb/fancyvrb.pdf

Answer 2

This is still unfixed? I'll take another look. What exactly do you want: your package to use VerbatimOut, or for it not to interfere with it?

Tests

TexLive 2009's Xelatex compiles fine. With pdflatex, version

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009)

I get an error message that is rather more useful error message than you got:

! Argument of \UTFviii@three@octets has an extra }.
 
                \par 
l.8 é

? i \makeatletter\show\UTFviii@three@octets
! Undefined control sequence.
\GenericError  ...                                
                                                    #4  \errhelp \@err@     ...
l.8 é

If I were to make a wild guess, I'd say that inputenc with pdftex uses the pdftex primitives to do some hairy storing and restoring of character tables, and some table somewhere has got a rarely mistake in it.

Possibly related

I saw a post by Vladimir Volovich in the pdf-tex mailing list archives, all the way back from 2003, that discusses a conflict between inputenc & fancyvrb, and posts a patch to "solve the problem". Who knows, maybe he faced the same problem? It might be worth emailing him.

Answer 3

XeTeX has much better Unicode support. The following run through xelatex produces “é” both in \jobname.test and the output PDF.

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\tracingonline=1
\usepackage{fancyvrb}

\begin{document}
\begin{VerbatimOut}{\jobname.test}
é
\end{VerbatimOut}

\input{\jobname.test}
\end{document}

fontspec loads the Latin Modern fonts, which have Unicode support. The standard TeX Computer Modern fonts don’t have the right tables for Unicode support.

If you use a character that does not have a glyph in the current font, by default XeTeX writes a blank space to the PDF and prints a warning in the log but not on the terminal. \tracingonline=1 prints the warning to the terminal.