Dear Richard,

sitting in front of a German keyboard, writing 

Gödel

seems to be the obvious solution for modern LaTeX and Emacs versions - you could define some shortcut to insert the appropriate Unicode character into your text (as your keyboard probably does not feature a "ö" key), or copy/paste the Umlauts from another Emacs file as necessary. If you do not need it very often, this might be a reasonable alternative. 

Warm regards,
 Stefan

On 03.11.2010, at 16:50, Richard Lawrence wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I don't think this is a bug so much as an unfortunate consequence of
> expected behavior, but I wanted to document it here for the sake of
> future mailing list searches, because I didn't find anything about it
> myself.  (If someone has a better solution than the one I propose,
> please clue me in!)
> 
> To add an umlaut/trema/diaeresis to a letter in LaTeX, I use the \"
> command, as in:
> 
> G\"{o}del
> 
> Unfortunately, due to the fact that Org export treats both `{}' and `"'
> specially, this will be exported to LaTeX as:
> 
> G\''\{o\}del
> 
> It isn't sufficient to surround the \"{o} with math mode delimiters, e.g.,
> 
> G\(\"{o}\)del
> 
> even though this will prevent Org from escaping the brackets and
> converting the double-quote, because the command doesn't seem to produce
> output in math mode.  (The compiled file will read "Gdel".)
> 
> So, the work-around I've come up with is to use an \mbox inside math
> mode, which prevents Org from doing the escapes/conversions:
> 
> G\(\mbox{\"{o}}\)del
> 
> A bit ugly, but it produces the correct output.
> 
> Hope that helps someone!  And again, if there's a better way, please let
> me know!
> 
> Best,
> Richard
> 
> 
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-- 
Dr. Stefan Vollmar, Dipl.-Phys.
Head of IT group
Max-Planck-Institut für neurologische Forschung
Gleuelerstr. 50, 50931 Köln, Germany
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