Created attachment 70584 [details]
try this file with latex file.tex

*** Bug 77311 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Possible example workaround to get a-umlaut encoded in UTF-8 recognized by TeX:

  \documentclass{article}
  \begin{document}

  % C3 A4 = LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS = \"a
  \catcode`^^c3=\active
  \def^^c3#1{\expandafter\ifx\csname UTF@C3@#1\endcsname\relax
  \unsupportedsequence\else\csname UTF@C3@#1\endcsname\fi}
  \expandafter\def\csname UTF@C3@^^a4\endcsname{\"a}

  Umlaut a with diaresis in UTF-8: d
  \end{document}

I forwarded this bug report to bugs@latex-project.org where it has been filed as
latex/3480 and is now the subject of an ongoing discussion there, see

  http://www.latex-project.org/cgi-bin/ltxbugs2html

On this page is a package that adds support for unicode.

I have been using it so far, and it seems to work.

http://www.unruh.de/DniQ/latex/unicode/

*** Bug 99155 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

The LaTeX distribution had beta-test support for UTF-8 since March 2004:

  ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/base/utf8ienc.dtx
  http://www.latex-project.org/ltnews/ltnews15.pdf

You can now simply write \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} and then encode
at least some of TeX's standard character repertoire in UTF-8 in your
LaTeX sources.

This package is meant to be much more light-weight than Dominique
Unruh's earlier UTF-8 package.

Excellent news!

Hopefully this version will make it into the next teTeX release.

Thanks for the update.

Is this related/duplicate of bug #83215 ?

No, this bug is about TeX, but bug 83215 is about perl

*** Bug 109229 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Personally I think this version changing is ugly as it makes you loose
context (against which release the bug originally was filed), but it
already happened before :( .

Just adding a comment to a bug stating the report is still valid for
the current release (FC 2) is cleaner IMO.

devel doesn't give any info whatsoever about when the bug was filed. 
As for updating to an recent release number, my experience has been
that bugs that remain unchanged for a long time, especially went filed
against old releases, tend to remain unchanged, and sometimes bumping
it up to the latest release brings it to the maintainer's attention
that the problem is still present.

As for preserving information about what the bug was filed against,
that's why there's a field in the bug report that asks for the package
version number.

<bad me having OT discussion in bugzilla>
Agreed on the "devel" not giving a lot of info.

But any bug that is still unresolved should be considered relevant to
the current release (otherwise it should be closed). The fact that I
close another bug as duplicate of this should have already drawn the
attention of the maintainer.
</bad me>

*** Bug 127800 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

What's the problem with this? RedHat is already shipping patched
versions in serveral packages, why not just include Dominique Unruh's
patch? Looking at LaTeX's architecture it should have no side effects
unless actively used though.

Energies are probably better spent on helping to finish

  ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/base/utf8ienc.dtx

which is how the LaTeX Project plans to do UTF-8 support. Once that's
done, it should quickly trickle downstream on its own through tetex
and into all the Linux distribs. No point in contacting each
maintainer of the individual distribution's packages, while the
problem is still being worked on actively upstream.

For comparison: SuSE Linux has included Dominique Unruh's monster
package at least since varsion 8.1 (October 2002), but as a separate
RPM, thereby avoiding problems that might occur once the LaTeX
base-system UTF-8 support arrives through tetex. Current SuSE RPMs:

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1/suse/noarch/latex-ucs-20030605-107.noarch.rpm
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1/suse/src/latex-ucs-20030605-107.src.rpm

Fedora Core 2 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for
security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please
reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a
security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC3 updates or
in the FC4 test release, reopen and change the version to match.

Fedora Extras 3 has tetex-unicode, and I understand that's built into tetex-3.0,
that's present in FC4 test releases, so I believe we've got this all covered.