The short answer is that TeX doesn't know how to deal with UTF-8 (or rather non-ASCII) characters. XeTeX has been designed to work around these limitations. The easiest way to generate PDFs is to install Xe(La)TeX and use the 'xedemo' templates - these templates have been 'ported' from LaTeX to XeLaTeX.
Distribution specific install instructions listed below.
Install texlive-xetex that includes xelatex
The templates use the Template Toolkit scripting language to generate actual content.
Depending on the typesetting language, the files use
* HTML;
* (Xe)LaTeX; or
* plain text
as the typesetting system.
While LaTeX and XeLaTeX are extremely similar, some differences exist, mainly in the area of font selection and document preamble.
Latex cheat sheet - http://www.stdout.org/~winston/latex/
When trying to use XeLaTeX, you may get a message like:
Make sure you have TexLive installed. Older TeTeX was recommended but according to Ubuntu repositories, TexLive is the new package to install.
You can install this with the following command:
apt-get install texlive-latex-extra