tabbing
So you are constructing a tabbing environment, and you
have the need of some diacriticised text — perhaps something as simple
as \’{e} — and the accent disappears because it has been
interpreted as a tabbing command, and everything goes
wrong.
This is really a rather ghastly feature of the tabbing
environment; in order to type accented characters you need to use the
\a kludge: so \a’{e} inside tabbing for
\’{e} outside, and similarly \a‘ for \‘ and \a=
for \=. This whole procedure is of course hideous and
error-prone.
The simplest alternative is to type in an encoding that has the diacriticised characters in it, and to use an appropriate encoding definition file in the inputenc package. So for example, type:
for:\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
...
\begin{tabbing}
...
...\>voilà\>...
… voilà …and the internal mechanisms of the inputenc package will put the right version of the accent command in there.
A witty reversal of the rôles is introduced by the package
Tabbing (note the capital “T”): it provides a
Tabbing environment which duplicates
tabbing, but all the single-character commands become
complicated objects. So tabbing’s \> becomes
\TAB>, \= becomes \TAB=, and so on. The above trivial
example would therefore become:
\usepackage{Tabbing}
...
\begin{Tabbing}
... ... \TAB> voil\`a \TAB> ...
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