Why bother with inputenc and fontenc?

inputenc

In current LaTeX release (2018 and later) You do not need to load inputenc as UTF-8 encoding, equivalent to

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

is preloaded into the format.

The standard input encoding for Western Europe prior to the wide adoption of Unicode was ISO 8859–1 (commonly known by the standard’s subtitle ‘Latin-1’). If you are still saving files in Latin-1 (or other) encoding then you will need to declare that via a declaration such as

\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

fonttenc

If you are using pdfLaTeX or LaTeX and do not specify

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

Then LaTeX will default to the original TeX OT1 encoding. Initially this may not seem to be a problem, especially if writing in English, however OT1 does not include any accented letters, so any accented letters will be constructed using the \accent primitive rather than using an accented character from the font. Any words using such a constructed accent will not be hyphenated.

Note that the t1enc package is available in the base distribution, which is equivalent to using the T1 option to fonttenc however it should not be used in current documents and is just retained for compatibility with the first versions of the LaTeX2e documentation, which were written before the fonttenc package was produced.

FAQ ID: Q-why-inp-font