Étale

Posted on by

A while back I changed all the occurences of “étale” into “etale”. Then yesterday, when Emmanuel Kowalski sent me some corrections to French spelling, I asked him to make a patch changing back “etale” into “éale” and overnight he emailed me one. To see the results for yourself, take a look at the chapter on Étale Cohomology. Better right?

But now that we have this I remember why I made the change originally. It was because having all the french accents in the scanned copies of EGA makes it basically impossible to quickly search for words in the text. For some reason this really annoys me (it is of course a failure of the software I am using and not of EGA).

As a funny consequence now searching for “etale” or “étale” in the dvis and pdfs of the stacks project fails too. I tested using xdvi, xpdf, and okular. Can somebody who uses acrobat reader see if it does work with that? Also, I assume that it does work if you have a french keyboard?

PS: A workaround is to search for “tale” and not “etale”.

7 thoughts on “Étale”

  1. In Acrobat reader (v. 9.3.4. on Linux) searching for “etale” finds all instances of \’etale. In Evince, for some reason, it finds only those instances occuring in section headings and in the header at the top of the page (in other words, it fails). In both programs, cutting and pasting an accented instance into the search box results in gibberish characters.

  2. I had not noticed the non-searchability of accents before… I think it is a general LaTeX problem — by default, accented letters are created by putting the letter and accents separately in the PDF/DVI file. The following link

    http://www.monperrus.net/martin/producing+searchable+and+copyable+pdf+files+with+accents+using+latex-pdflatex

    suggests adding \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} to solve this problem. It seems to work, though there are apparently other issues going with it.

  3. P.S. But actually, it turns out that searching ‘étale’ does work with acrobat (my version is 9.3.4 on Linux; it works even with a non-French keyboard, which is what I use).

  4. The fact it does work with acrobat means that eventually the other pdf readers will catch up, and since right now this issue exists only with the word “étale” I think we can safely ignore the problem.

  5. Searching for “etale” works some of the time in xpdf 3.02 on NetBSD 5.0.2. It finds the word in the header at the top of the page and in the table of contents, but mostly not in the text or in section headings. But the search function in xpdf is generally not very good…

  6. In okular searching for “´” (produced by hitting the “´”-key twice) instead of “é” works for me. So searching for “´tale” will find “étale”, searching for “g´n´rique” will find “générique” and so on.

Comments are closed.