Re: wikipedia and UTF8 coding (emacs21)

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

Reiner> I'd guess that Uwe prevailingly needs Spanish and German
Reiner> non-ASCII characters.  Those are sufficiently supported by
Reiner> already in Emacs 21 with (add-to-list
Reiner> 'file-coding-system-alist '("/wikipedia/" utf-8)) as
Reiner> suggested by Stefan.  With this entry every file in
Reiner> .../wikipedia/ is de- and encoded with UTF-8.

> Honestly I don't know enough of wiki(pedia) but I am oops sure/not
> sure that the coding is more general. I tried to convert the document
> using iconv to iso8859-1 and it failed. I have seen in those documents
> Hebrew, Cyrillic and other codings, so that might be "true" utf-8.

Emacs-21.4's handling of UTF-8 takes care of significantly more than just
latin-1.  What Reiner was saying is that you probably only really care about
the latin-1 chars (which will assuredly be displayed properly) and don't
mind if Emacs doesn't properly display some of the other characters, as long
as it does preserve them across load&save (it will display them as an empty
box if your unicode font doesn't have them).


        Stefan