Polish in LaTeX

[Laura Conrad]

I'm having trouble typing Polish text in LateX. When I feed it a test
document with characters in isolation, they come out the way I expect
(assuming I've written "\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}" in the prolog). So
\k{a} is an a with an ogonek, \'n is an n with an acute accent, etc.

But when I try to write real text, where the Polish characters are
mixed in with other characters, LaTeX seems to think I'm doing some
wierd math stuff, and some of the characters come out right, and some
of them switch the text to italic and come out as funny math symbols.

Attached is my test file. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

I'm sure google is my friend, but most of what it says about how to
write Polish is in Polish, and I only know enough about Polish to sing
it, not to read technical documentation.

[Dan Luecking]

Post by Laura Conrad
I'm having trouble typing Polish text in LateX. When I feed it a test
document with characters in isolation, they come out the way I expect
(assuming I've written "\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}" in the prolog). So
\k{a} is an a with an ogonek, \'n is an n with an acute accent, etc.
But when I try to write real text, where the Polish characters are
mixed in with other characters, LaTeX seems to think I'm doing some
wierd math stuff, and some of the characters come out right, and some
of them switch the text to italic and come out as funny math symbols.

You have "_"s at several places in the file. These represent the
instruction to place a subscript in math so latex naturally switches
to math mode. If you want an underscore character, use "\_".

You also have several \l that have run into the next letter as: "\la"
I assume this is meant to be "\l a" the command "\l" followed by an "a"
rather than some command "\la".


Dan

[Laura Conrad]

Dan> You have "_"s at several places in the file. These represent the
Dan> instruction to place a subscript in math so latex naturally switches
Dan> to math mode. If you want an underscore character, use "\_".

Dan> You also have several \l that have run into the next letter
Dan> as: "\la" I assume this is meant to be "\l a" the command
Dan> "\l" followed by an "a" rather than some command "\la".


Thanks, that fixes everything.

[Ignacy Sawicki]

Post by Laura Conrad
I'm having trouble typing Polish text in LateX. When I feed it a test
document with characters in isolation, they come out the way I expect
(assuming I've written "\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}" in the prolog). So
\k{a} is an a with an ogonek, \'n is an n with an acute accent, etc.

You can also use the following command:

\usepackage[cp1250]{inputenc}

in the preample. Now, assuming you have the Polish keyboard installed
(which allows you to type Polish diacritics by using Alt Gr with the
appropriate letter: Alt Gr + z for z-dot, Alt Gr + a for a-ogonek and Alt
Gr + x for z-acute, etc.), you can just type those characters directly into
your TeX source file and TeX will interpret them correctly: no more, rather
ugly and unreadable, \k{a} and so on.

If you are having problems seeing the appropriate characters in WinEdt,
then you need to change the font to a Central European one, by going to
Options/Fonts/Courier CE.

The above assumes that you are using Windows. Under UNIX you would need to
change the cp1250 to something like iso-latin2, but I am not completely
sure.

Regards,

Ignac