7.1 Pdflatex for latin and cyrillic scripts

An easy solution, sufficient for German, French, and other languages for which support is already in a standard LaTeX-setup, is to add the line

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

in your Latex preamble (set in the Document properties dialog, available on the Edit menu).

In addition, you may need to setup your document language. So, to use UTF-8 encoded Russian in LaTeX, your preamble would look like this:

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}

When setting this up, you have to keep in mind that Ipe can only handle scalable fonts, such as Postscript Type1 fonts. You'll have to choose a setup that uses such scalable fonts. Quite often it is sufficient to install the package cm-super, which contains Type1 versions of standard fonts.

If your LaTeX setup does not contain scalable fonts for your document, it will often fall back on Metafont fonts in bitmapped Type3 format. Ipe will show an error message informing you about Type3 fonts in your LaTeX output. In that case, try installing cm-super, or use a package that explicitly uses Postscript fonts. For instance, for Russian you could install the PsCyr package, and the following preamble:

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}
\usepackage{pscyr}