User feedback when trying to use Unicode without necessary fonts

[photm5]

With these contents in a file test.tex:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\begin{document}
Störende Heißluft
\end{document}

When I run tectonic test.tex, the output pdf says "Strende Heiluft". To make sure, I also tried latex test.tex; xdvipdfmx test.dvi, and that result says "Störende Heißluft", as expected.

The output of tectonic --version is Tectonic 0.1.7. Any other output I should paste?

[pkgw]

Thanks for reporting. What happens if you remove the \usepackage line? Tectonic is essentially XeTeX under the hood, so it is UTF8-aware out of the box; the inputenc package should be unnecessary.

[photm5]

Without the \usepackage line, it still only says "Strende Heiluft".

[pkgw]

How about if you add \usepackage{fontspec}? That fixes the problem for me.

Assuming that's correct, I didn't realize that fontspec was strictly necessary for Unicode to work. Tectonic should print out a warning in this case if possible. I think the problem is that without loading fontspec, only the classic non-Unicode fonts are loaded, and I guess then it just silently drops unsupported characters.

[photm5]

(I composed this before you wrote that last comment:)

If I run xelatex test.tex, with or without the \usepackage line, it works: "Störende Heißluft". But the version of xelatex I used to try this seems to be different from what tectonic uses. Output of xelatex test.tex:

This is XeTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-0.99998 (TeX Live 2017) (preloaded format=xelatex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./test.tex
LaTeX2e <2017-04-15>
Babel <3.15> and hyphenation patterns for 22 language(s) loaded.
(/opt/texlive/2017/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2014/09/29 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class
(/opt/texlive/2017/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo)) (./test.aux) [1]
(./test.aux) )
Output written on test.pdf (1 page).
Transcript written on test.log.

Output of tectonic test.tex -p:

note: this is a BETA release; ask questions and report bugs at https://tectonic.newton.cx/
Running TeX ...
(test.tex
LaTeX2e <2016/03/31>
Babel <3.9r> and hyphenation patterns for 83 language(s) loaded.
(article.cls
Document Class: article 2014/09/29 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class
(size10.clo)) (test.aux) [1] (test.aux) )
(see the transcript file for additional information)
Output written on test.xdv (1 page, 236 bytes).
Transcript written on test.log.
note: warnings were issued by the TeX engine; use --print and/or --keep-logs for details.
Running xdvipdfmx ...
[1]
Writing test.pdf (2539 bytes)
Skipped writing 1 intermediate files (use --keep-intermediates to keep them)

[photm5]

Yes! Adding \usepackage{fontspec} fixes the issue for me. For reference, here's the full example now:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}

\begin{document}
Störende Heißluft
\end{document}

Thanks!

[pkgw]

OK. I'm going to repurpose this issue to be about the user experience: if someone is doing what you initially tried, there should be some feedback suggesting that fontspec be loaded.

[pkgw]

Note to self: the right place to do this might be the char_warning function. If you set \tracinglostchars=2, this function will log warnings about missing characters that get triggered appropriately for the example document at the top of this issue.