How can I compile LaTeX in UTF8? [closed]

I did my document in an ISO-standard. It does not support umlaut alphabets, such as ä and ö. I need them. The document gets compiled without UTF8, but not with UTF8. More precisely, the document does not get compiled with the line at the beginning of my main.tex:

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

How can I compile my LaTeX document in UTF8?

I'm not sure whether I got your problem but maybe it helps if you store the source using a UTF-8 encoding.

I'm also using \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} in my LaTeX sources and by storing the files as UTF-8 files everything works just peachy.

Save your file in UTF8 format.

Verify the file format using the following (UNIX) command:

file -bi filename.tex 

You should see:

text/x-tex; charset=utf-8

Convert the file using iconv if it is not UTF8:

iconv --from-code=ISO-8859-1 --to-code=UTF-8 filename.txt > filename-utf.txt

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} will not work for a bibliographic entry such as this:

@ARTICLE{Hardy2007,
author = {Ibn Taymiyyah, Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al{-}Halīm},
title = {Naqḍ al{-}manṭiq},
shorttitle = {Naqḍ al-manṭiq},
editor = {Ḥamzah, Aḥmad},
publisher = {Maktabat a{l-}Sunnah},
address = {Cairo},
year = {1970},
sortname = {IbnTaymiyyaNaqdalmantiq},
keywords = { Logic, Medieval}} 

For this entry use \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}

Convert your document to utf8. LaTeX just reads your text as it is. If you want to use the utf8 input encoding, your document has to be encoded in utf8. This can usually be set by the editor. There is also the program iconv that is useful for converting files from iso encodings to utf.

In the end, you'll have to use an editor that is capable of supporting utf. (I have no idea about the status of utf support on windows, but any reasonable editor on linux should be fine).