> Can anyone tell me whether LyX supports Unicode (e.g. UTF-8) > or not? > I didn't manage to get it receive Unicode string from clipboard. How > can I type Unicode character to it?
LyX doesn't support unicode directly, but you could use unicode in your documents.
You need the latest LaTeX (the file inputenc.sty in the LaTeX-distribution must be at least version v1.0d from 2004/02/05).
And you need the package 'unicode'.
To use unicode, add the line
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
to the preamble. Then go to the menu Layout->Document->Language->Encoding and choose 'default'.
Normally in this menu the option for the inputenc.sty could be set, but the option 'utf8' was too new for LyX 1.3.4. (I'll write a bug report).
Now you can use all characters on your keyboard and they will be encoded as unicode chars, but as LyX doesn't support unicode directly, some charcters make problems. E.g. the â(EURO) sign. If you type it directly in LyX, the unicode-package won't encode it. To get the sign anyway, use the command \unicar. When looking in the unicode-tables, you will find the â as char '20AC'. To pass it to the \unicar command you have to recalculate its number to the decimal system.
'20AC' in the hexadecimal-system is '8364' in the decimal system.
Now you can type \unichar{8364} to get the unicode encoded â sign. For the output, the Euro sign of the package textcomp is used (an ugly one, but if you use a 'good' font, like the lm-font you'll get a beautiful one).
Therefore you have to add the line
\usepackage{textcomp}
to the preamble to avoid LaTeX errors.
As you can see, unicode is still a hack and not useful in LaTeX. The LaTeX developers hope to get it running someday, but this could last years ;-).
regards Uwe
