Re: user sees \xxx but is thwarted from searching for them

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@fencepost.gnu.org>]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 10:04:50 -0600 (MDT)
> 
>     I was in such a situation yesterday. Normally I use latin-1 encoding but
>     switched to language environment latin-9 to edit some files containing Euro
>     signs and forgot about this change. Then I loaded a 400 line DOS file
>     containing "-*- coding: cp850 -*-" in the first line. Emacs encoded all the
>     umlauts already in the file as latin-1 but encoded the typed umlauts as
>     latin-9. And after minor changes all over the file and a few interruptions
>     I didn't remember which parts were changed and which were old ...
> 
> Does anyone have an idea for what we should do about this?

Help Handa-san make the switch to Unicode ;-)

The problem is that the target charset of cp850 is Latin-1, not
Latin-9.  OTOH, in a Latin-9 language environment, non-ASCII
characters typed by the user are by default converted to Latin-9
characters.

> Does the change to turn on unify-on-encoding fix this automatically?

Yes, as long as the user doesn't type characters that are unique to
Latin-1 and to Latin-9 (like if they use both the currency symbol and
the Euro symbol in the same buffer).  That is, assuming that the
result, probably UTF-8, is not what the users expect.

> Will the switch to native Unicode fix it?

Yes.