Using Korean UTF8 fonts in LaTeX with koTeX

Although I am not an academic, I sometimes use LaTeX to write documents containing mathematical expressions. My resume is also formatted as a .tex document which I then export to PDF using pdflatex. One inconvenience, however, is that regular LaTeX doesn't support UTF8 characters.

When I searched the Internet for ways to add Korean fonts to .tex documents, I first came across the package texlive-langcjk which can be invoked in your document with \usepackage {CJKutf8} but it fails to correctly render Korean fonts using the pdflatex rendering engine.

I then tried the koTeX package which can be found in the default Fedora 24 repositories as texlive-kotex-* and in the default Archlinux repositories as texlive-langkorean. In your LaTeX preamble simply add

\usepackage {kotex}

and you will be able to use any UTF8 Korean fonts you have installed on your system. Note that you must use xetex instead of pdflatex as your tex to pdf rendering engine, however.

To use xetex on Fedora, you must have the texlive-xetex-bin package installed. On Archlinux, xetex can be found in the package texlive-bin. If you find that you are missing some .sty font files needed to render your LaTeX document to PDF, you will have to install those separately. For example, on Fedora I had to separately install texlive-isodate, texlive-substr, texlive-textpos, and texlive-titlesec before my resume template could render into PDF using xetex.