Re: displaying 8bit characters octal sequences

[Stefan <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Stefan, thanks a lot, though I am still not sure I understand
> correctly what you say. If I understand you right

> (standard-display-default 128 255)

> should work if I am not in unibyte mode. 

Yes, but it only applies to chars in the 128-255 range (in the domain of
the chars internal to Emacs, not in latin-1, or koi-8, or whathaveyou).

> When I load a buffer with german umlaute in "emacs --no-init-file",
> according to the modeline emacs is not using the unibyte mode.
> Nonetheless, standard-display-default has no effect for me either.
> Or am I missing something here?

When not in multibyte mode, most likely your umlaute are correctly
recognized as latin-1 and represented as latin-1 chars internally (with
codepoints around 2200 or 2300 IIRC).  Try C-u C-x = on one of those chars.

To see the octal sequence try: open the file in unibyte mode, then type
M-x toggle-enable-multibyte-characters RET.


        Stefan