Special names in Latex

Question

Hi,

In my english thesis latex file, how to mention the following non English words: François, École Fédérale?

Thanks and regards!

Answer 1

The traditional way is to use the accent-adding macros:

Fran\c{c}ois
\'Ecole F\'ed\'erale

(You can also write Fran\c{}cois or Fran\c cois; the \c macro uses no parameter; the braces or space are just a trick to allow LaTeX to see the proper macro name.)

Otherwise, try this:

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

and type the accents directly, with UTF-8 encoding.

There are a host of more-or-less subtle issues with fonts and hyphenation.

Answer 2

If you don't go the UTF8 inputenc route, and yet find yourself writing a lot of these names, I'd suggest defining macros for them. At the simplest, you can say

\newcommand\Francois{Fran\c cois}

but then you need to be sure to use it as such: \Francois{} so that any spaces afterwards don't get gobbled.

On the other hand, the following technique works pretty well too (though I can't take credit for inventing it - I saw it originally in a short talk at BachoTeX 2009 by Philip Taylor):

\makeatletter
\let\latex@less<
\catcode`<13
\def<{\ifmmode\latex@less\else\expandafter\find@name\fi}
\def\find@name#1>{\@nameuse{name.#1}}
\def\DefineName#1#2{\@namedef{name.#1}{#2}}
\makeatother

Now you can define special names using, e.g.

\DefineName{Francois}{Fran\c cois}
\DefineName{Ecole Federale}{\'Ecole F\'ed\'erale}

and later on you can use them in text with

I ran into <Francois> at the <Ecole Federale> the other day.

You can make your tags (the plain ASCII versions) be whatever you want - they don't have to actually be related to the properly accented names.

---

EDIT: in response to the issue that misspelled names don't produce errors, you can change the definition of \find@name to

\def\find@name#1>{\ifcsname name.#1\endcsname
  \@nameuse{name.#1}%
\else
  \@latex@warning{Undefined name #1}%
\fi}

Note that \@latex@warning{...} can be changed to \@latex@error{...}\@eha and it will complain more forcefully. Or if you want to pretend to be (or actually be) a package you can use \Package(Warning|Error){<package name>} in place of \@latex@(warning|error) and it won't pretend to be a built-in LaTeX error anymore.