Compositor 1.3 is out!
What’s New
The big news is a UTF-8 based workflow, with support for accented Latin characters. For a complete list of resolved issues, please visit the release page on Github.
UTF-8 Based Workflow
Compositor 1.3 brings a first step towards a modern, Unicode-based workflow.
The editor now accepts accented Latin characters (as supported by the Latin Modern family of fonts) directly. The same is true for document files, as long as
- the file encoding is UTF-8, and
- there’s a
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}line.
Compositor will insert the latter if not already present. Encodings other than utf8 will likely
cause issues (e.g., \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} will not be supported).
Also, non-Latin character sets (e.g., Cyrillic) are not yet supported. Cyrillic should be doable in the mid term, though, since it’s very close in structure to the Latin alphabet.
For more complex scripts (e.g., Arabic, Chinese), you will have to resort to XeTeX or LuaTeX. I don’t think Compositor will ever support these writing systems, since they violate some core assumptions of its design.
So, if you’re fine with a document preamble like this:
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
Compositor should generally work for you. If something doesn’t work as expected, please let me know. The T1 font encoding for 8 bit TeX engines is explained in more detail here, if you’re curious.
Note:
Even though LaTeX2e as of TeX Live 2018 is able to digest UTF-8 input
without a \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} line, Compositor will insert this line anyway for better backward compatibility
with earlier versions of LaTeX (i.e., if you want to process your documents with TeX Live 2017).
Next Up
Release 1.4, scheduled for August 7, will be mostly about fixing internals, updating to the latest tools, plus hopefully some user interface and usability improvements.