German Umlaute in RMarkdown and rticle

Question

I create a new document using the R Markdown Template American Economic Association journals. However, when knitting the whole document, my German Umlaute (such as ä, ü, Ö) are not displayed at all.

Reproducible example:

---
title: "Der Effekt von Ü auf Ö and ä"
short: "ä ü ö"
journal: "AER" # AER, AEJ, PP, JEL
month: "`r lubridate::month(Sys.time())`"
year: "`r lubridate::year(Sys.time())`"
vol: 1
issue: 1
jel:
  - A10
  - A11
keywords:
  - ö
author:
  - name: Öder Ügo
    firstname: Ö
    surname: Ügo
acknowledgements: |
  Acknowledgements
abstract: |
 ÖÄÜ
output: rticles::aea_article
---

Possible duplicate of [How can I write special characters in RMarkdown latex documents?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26821326/how-can-i-write-special-characters-in-rmarkdown-latex-documents) — Jan van der Laan, Jun 07 '18 at 09:57
@JanvanderLaan: No - not a duplicate, because this solution does not work for me — BeSeLuFri, Jun 07 '18 at 10:08

Ralf Stubner · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-19T13:09:00.160

If you look at the resulting TeX file, you see the umlauts right there. The problem is just that by default LaTeX does not know how to deal with them. I see two possible solutions:

Make use of XeLaTeX via

output: 
  rticles::aea_article:
    latex_engine: xelatex

Adjust the template.tex file to include \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} in the preamble.

I would use the first approach. Either way you might have to post-process the resulting TeX file before submission: Replace all umlauts by the corresponding TeX commands (\"{U} etc.) and possbily remove the \usepackage.

In the future, this will work out of the box, since LaTeX will use UTF-8 by default!

German Umlaute in RMarkdown and rticle

1 Answers1