Fonts & Character Sets ⇒ Chinese font: Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:陈 not set up for use with LaTeX

[NeilFJ]

I need to understand Tex to solve a problem with PDF conversion of R markdown texts containing UTF8 (Chinese) characters. This fails with a message: ! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:陈 not set up for use with LaTeX. See the inputenc package documentation for explanation. (I can't find any such documentation)
Type H <return> for immediate help.
Try running pandoc with --latex-engine=xelatex.
pandoc: Error producing PDF from TeX source
Error: pandoc document conversion failed with error 43
Spending a day with TexLive I can see that there's a fundamental and doubtless trivial issue with fonts: whatever I try produces a font-not-found error or just prints ???.
I only wish to use fonts which I understand come installed with Tex: SimSun, SimHei, FangSong, but they are not found. Clearly there's a step I'm missing.
Very grateful for assistance,
Neil

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Neil,

welcome to the forum!

I did never use Chinese before, with LaTeX, so I did not answer yet. Were you already able to find the cause and to fix the problem? If not, perhaps post a small piece of compilable code, which I would test on my TeX Live installation.

Stefan