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— title: Why bother with `inputenc` and `fontenc`? category: usage permalink: /FAQ-why-inp-font redirect_from: /FAQ-t1enc date: 2014-06-10 —

# Why bother with `inputenc` and `fontenc`?

The standard input encoding for Western Europe (pending the arrival of Unicode) is ISO 8859–1 (commonly known by the standard's subtitle 'Latin-1'). Latin-1 is remarkably close, in the codepoints it covers, to the (La)TeX T1 encoding.

In this circumstance, why should one bother with [`inputenc`](https://ctan.org/pkg/inputenc) and [`fontenc`](https://ctan.org/pkg/fontenc)? Since they're pretty exactly mirroring each other, one could do away with both, and use just [`t1enc`](https://ctan.org/pkg/t1enc), despite its [shortcomings](FAQ-t1enc.md).

One doesn't do this for a variety of small reasons:

- Confusion You've been happily working in this mode, and for

some reason find you're to switch to writing in German: the effect
of using `ß` is somewhat startling, since T1
and Latin-1 treat the codepoint differently.

- Compatibility You find yourself needing to work with a

colleague in Eastern Europe: their keyboard is likely to be set to
produce Latin-2, so that the simple mapping doesn't work.

- Traditional LaTeX You lapse and write something like

`\'{e}` rather than typing `é`; only [`fontenc`](https://ctan.org/pkg/fontenc)
has the means to convert this LaTeX sequence into the T1
character, so an `\accent` primitive slips through into the
output, and hyphenation is in danger.

The [`inputenc`](https://ctan.org/pkg/inputenc)–[`fontenc`](https://ctan.org/pkg/fontenc) combination seems slow and cumbersome, but it's safe.