inputenc Error: Unicode char u8: not set up for use with LaTeX

usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}

Ubuntu:

You must install texlive-latex-extra before use it.

Fedora:

You must install texlive-collection-latexextra before use it.

As this is one of the top google hits for this error message, here's a more general answer with an example:

The cause is a unicode character in one of your input files that isn't mapped to an output. This may -- especially if you're using the (unicode-supporting) biblatex/biber system -- be in your bibliography. This is a good place to look for errors as .bib files downloaded from publishers website are often malformed. You can tell if the error comes from the bib file - the line number in the error message will be that of your end{document}, which makes tracking down the actual error rather tricky (inspecting various aux files doesn't appear to help).

Some of these errors are subtle, like the non-breaking space in the question, or the hyphen (U+2010) character given to me by one journal, which looks identical to the hyphen-minus produced by the keyboard.

Copying the character after the hyphen and searching for it should help - unless your command window or editor "helps" by converting it to the more common equivalent or replacing unicode with blanks - in that case copy it from your .log and search all the input files.

(I'm happy to expand this in response to comments or watch it grow -- it's just an attempt to be helpful to searchers)

You may get this error also if you use different language for bibtex. In that case project.bbl may contain characters in different encoding (e.g latin2).

What you need to do is swap encoding when rendering bibliography to latin2 and switch back to utf8 after.

inputencoding{latin2}
bibliography{mybib}
inputencoding{utf8}

Hope this helps.

This happened to me when I did save my .tex file with utf8 but forgot to save also the .bib file with the same encoding (it was still in ANSI).

Instead of returning back to ANSI on my .tex file I just opened the .bib file with Notepad++ and chose to convert to utf8.

Then after compiling everything was working OK.

If this happens in the bibliography, try specifying the language explicitly to bibtextu:

bibtextu -l ru my_paper_with_russian_bibliography

This fixed it for me.

I had this Error because I accidentally saved an included .tex file as ANSI while the master file was in UTF-8.

You can change file encoding in Notepad++ for example. But you will need to copy it from the the ANSI version and paste it into the UTF-8 version.

I have found the same problem but none of the above answers solved it. In the end, I found the code '{i} in my .bib file. This was supposed to yield í but was producing a crazy unicode char that broke compilation. This .bib file was exported from CiteULike based on a reference that I entered mannually or copy-&-pasted from somewhere else. I suppose something wrong happened while converting a mannually entered/pasted í to '{i}.

I had two similar problems:

1. "Unicode char u8: "
2. "Unicode char u8:." (with dot)

The problems were related to the .bib file (references list).

The first problem was solved based on the DeclareUnicodeCharacter{00A0}{ } stated by @egreg.

The second one was helped by the @Chris H 's answer. I opened the generated file .log and looked for errors. I found:

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char u8:C3. not set up for use with LaTeX.

Then, I looked the "C3" string in the generated file .bbl and I found out that the letter "Ó" (the first letter of an author's name, Óscar Oballe-Peinado) was the problem. So, I changed it in the bibliography file for {'{O}} and voilà!

Despite I'm using "usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}", it seems not working specifically with the accented first letter of the first name of authors.

Inserting

% !TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode

at the beginning of the file solved this issue for me.

XeTeX is more suitable than most other TeX engines for unicode : replace the lines

usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

with

usepackage{fontspec}

and compile with xelatex myfile.tex.

My error was related, but slightly different:

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode character ╩│ (U+02B3)

or

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode character ᵉ (U+1D49)  
(inputenc)                not set up for use with LaTeX.

I had these errors because of a bibliographic entries generated in French babel which typesets the edition field, e.g. 1ʳᵉ éd. or 3ᵉ éd. using a raised re or e, resulting in U+02B3 and U+1D49 which apparently are not valid, even though (so far) all the other accented characters, e.g., é in édition are valid...

Because of my complex pandoc settings from Markdown with Libertine font, I don't want to swap to another *Tex engine...

So, my band-aid fix was to use the math mode to raise these letters:

DeclareUnicodeCharacter{1D49}{$^text{e}$}
DeclareUnicodeCharacter{02B3}{$^text{r}$}

Also, if you're using pandoc, put them in your header-includes: part of the front matter.

An anwser for a slightly different case:

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode character ° (U+B0)
(inputenc)                not set up for use with LaTeX.

Here, the answer is very simple:

usepackage{textcomp}

This packages defines the textdegree macro and also sets up ° to use it.