Using UTF-8 with fithesis

My faculty has it’s own thesis LaTex style, which makes it very easy to get a decent looking thesis out of LaTeX without too much effort. The problem is that the style requires you to use ISO-8859-2 in your document, which is something I can’t really live with. :) Here are instructions how to convert the style to UTF-8. I’m posting them here in hope that it will help some other student of Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University in the future.

I’m doing this on an Ubuntu laptop, so first I’ll need LaTeX:

sudo apt-get install texlive

Then download fithesis:

wget http://www.fi.muni.cz/~xpavlov/fithesis/install.sh
wget http://www.fi.muni.cz/~xpavlov/fithesis/fithesis-0.2.12.tar.gz
tar -zxvf fithesis-0.2.12.tar.gz
cd fithesis-0.2.12

Convert the sources to UTF-8 and change the package options in the file:

recode latin2..utf8 fithesis.dtx
sed -i 's/latin2/utf8/' fithesis.dtx

And now we can install it:

cd ..
chmod a+x install.sh
./install.sh 0.2.12 /usr/share

At this point you can use the package in your UTF-8 encoded LaTeX document.