\newthought eats UTF-8 double quotes

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I'm using XeLaTeX, and usually use the UTF-8 double quotes instead of the
normal ``''.

The command \newthought{The term “participle”} results in the close quotes
being "eaten": THE TERM "PARTICIPLE is not a real part of speech....

There is a workaround: \newthought{The term “participle\protect{”}} works
correctly. But I don't think the \protect should be necessary, IMO.

I'm using svn revision r79 of Tufte-LaTeX.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by Empirica...@gmail.com on 21 Feb 2009 at 3:44

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I've confirmed this problem.  It appears that the soul package doesn't support 
utf-8.
 There is apparently a soulutf8 package that attempts to fix this. 

I don't have this package installed on my computer right now, but I'll give it 
a shot
soon.  If you beat me to it, let me know if it solves the problem.

Original comment by godbyk@gmail.com on 9 Apr 2009 at 11:42

• Changed state: Accepted

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I tried adding \usepackage{soulutf8} in my document source. No change. Then I 
tried
changing the tufte-common.sty reference from soul.sty to soulutf8.sty. Again, no
change in behavior. :-(

Original comment by Empirica...@gmail.com on 10 Apr 2009 at 12:43

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I could not track it down 100% yet, but using the nols (no letterspacing) 
option works.

Original comment by andytho...@web.de on 21 Apr 2009 at 8:42

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Yeah, the nols option tells the document class to not load any of the 
letterspacing
stuff.  For the xelatex folks, if the font they're using supports it, they can
achieve letterspacing using the LetterSpace and WordSpace attributes with the
fontspec package.  I haven't had time to play with xelatex much yet, but this 
appears
to not work with all fonts.

I think the best solution would be to find a general way to achieve 
letterspacing
using XeLaTeX.  If we can find a solution that always works under XeLaTeX 
(regardless
of the font being used), they we can write a condition in the document class 
that
will employ that special XeLaTeX technique (and avoid using the soul package 
altogether).

As far as I've been able to tell, the soul package's letterspacing is barfing 
on the
utf-8 characters (quotation marks).

Original comment by godbyk@gmail.com on 21 Apr 2009 at 8:59

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I do not know if that helps anyone, but soul is only eating special characters 
if there is a space afterwards. I 
made a small test file (attached). Otherwise the letterspacing works fine.

Original comment by andytho...@web.de on 21 Apr 2009 at 10:17

Attachments:

• soultest4.tex
• soultest4.pdf