Re: Trying to input Unicode via GNU Emacs 21.3.1

[August <fusionfive@comhem.se>]

On lör, 2005-02-12 at 04:06 +0100, August wrote:
> On fre, 2005-02-11 at 22:31 +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
> > List account <lists@norvelle.org> writes:
> > 
> > > I am trying to use GNU Emacs 21.3.1 on FreeBSD (5.3) to edit web pages
> > > (I'm accessing my FreeBSD machine via Terminal.App on a Mac, with
> > > TERM=xterm-color).  I need to input Unicode characters and have them
> > > appear properly in web browsers.  Currently, I have gotten Emacs to
> > > use "Unicode" mode (i.e. the two or three little "u"'s appear at the
> > > bottom left), and I am able to enter characters that look just fine in
> > > Emacs, but they display as gibberish in browsers.
> > >
> > > For instance, I need to be able to display the typical accented
> > > Spanish, Italian and French characters.  As an example, I can input
> > > "Alarcón" in Emacs and it looks fine, but it displays in my browser
> > > (Camino 0.82 on Mac OS X) as "Alarcón".  The odd thing is that I
> > > basically copied and modified this text from a page that actually
> > > works just fine.
> > >
> > > I have the following lines in my .emacs:
> > > (setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
> > > (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
> > > (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
> > > (set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
> > > (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
> > 
> > It would appear that the browser is of the opinion that the selection
> > is in latin-1, your system default.  You are explicitly telling Emacs
> > to ignore the system default.
> > 
> > Also with your other settings you tell Emacs that everything the
> > locale appears to be is wrong.  The easiest thing probably would be if
> > you not only told your Emacs that all of your environment is utf-8,
> > but if you just configured your environment to actually be so, in
> > which case you would not have to tell all of those lies to Emacs.
> > 
> > It may be that in a Latin-1 locale, Emacs-21.3 does not have a way to
> > tell the browser "Everything in the selection is utf-8".  I believe
> > that the development version of Emacs _has_ had some changes, due to
> > some X conventions that have been introduced or become common-place
> > only after Emacs 21.3 has been release, so it might fair better with
> > passing Unicode characters over a selection that it principally
> > Latin-1, at least when the other program also knows about those
> > conventions.
> 
> I'm not sure it's the settings that causes the problem. I run Emacs on
> Fedora Core 3 and have no coding system settings in my `.emacs'. All new
> buffers have coding system utf-8 by default, but Mozilla Firefox does
> not display the letters `å', `ä', `ö', `Å', `Ä' or `Ö' correctly when I
> view my own html pages, if I choose Latin-1 in Emacs they work with
> Mozilla.

In my case the problem showed out to be caused by a combination of the
settings in Mozilla Firefox and in the Tidy HTML validation tool. In
Mozilla I changed `Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Languages ->
Character Encoding' from the default `Western (ISO-8859-1)' to `Unicode
(UTF-8)' and in the tidy command i added `-utf8'. Now it works.

-- 
August