Guide to LaTeX (4th Edition) (Tools and Techniques

26 Chapter 2. Text, Symbols, and Commands
2.5.9 Typing special symbols directly
The commands for producing the special characters and accented letters in
! the previous sections may be suitable for typing isolated ‘foreign’ words, but
become quite tedious for inputting large amounts of text making regular use of
such characters. Most computer systems provide non-English keyboards with
appropriate fonts for typing these national variants directly. Unfortunately, the
coding of such extra symbols is by no means standard, depending very much on
the computer system.
For example, the text Gauß meets Ampère entered with an MS-DOS editor
(code page 437 or 850) appears in a Windows application as Gauá meets AmpˇSre
and on a Macintosh as Gau meets Ampäre. Since LAT EX is intended to run on
all systems, it simply ignores all such extra character codes on the grounds that
they are not properly defined.
The inputenc package solves this problem. It not only informs LAT Package:
EX which
inputenc input coding scheme is being used, it also tells it what to do with the extra
characters. One invokes it with
\usepackage[code]{inputenc}
where code is the name of the coding scheme to be used. The current list of
allowed values for code (more are added with each L AT E X update) can be found in
Table D.1 on page 462. For most users, the most interesting codes are:
cp437 IBM code page 437 (DOS, North America)
cp850 IBM code page 850 (DOS, Western Europe)
applemac Macintosh encoding
ansinew Windows ANSI encoding
In short, you should select applemac for a Macintosh, and ansinew for Windows,
and one of the others if you are working with DOS.
Documents making use of this package are fully portable to other computer
systems. The source text produced with a DOS editor may still look very strange
to a human user reading it on a Macintosh, but when the Macintosh L AT E X processes
it, the proper DOS interpretations will be applied so that the end result is what
the author intended.
See Section D.5 for more details.
2.5.10 Ligatures
In book printing, certain combinations of letters are not printed as individuals
but as a single symbol, a so-called ligature. T E X processes the
letter combinations ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl not as
ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl but rather as ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl
Ligatures may be broken, that is, forced to be printed as separate letters,
by inserting \/ between the letters. This is sometimes desired for such
words as shelfful (shelf\/ful), which looks rather strange when printed
with the normal ff ligature, shelfful.