Oliver Scholz writes: Going to the subject of multibyte chars instead of the original topic of skeletons for a moment: > Harry Putnam writes: > >> Oliver Scholz writes: >> >> Oliver... I must have some language setting that will help me read >> your response. I see quite a lot of unusual chars, back slashes and >> three diget number in your text. > [...] > > That sounds as if the text is interpreted as unibyte text. What is the > value of `enable-multibyte-characters' in this buffer? -- But if it is > t, what does `C-u C-x =' return with point on such a character? Oliver... Sorry I took so long to reply here. Since its been so long since this thread was current.. The response of yours referenced abouve is: Message-ID: About `enable-multibyte-characters': In that buffer the value is `nil' but I ran into something I don't understand trying to set it to `t'. M-x set-variable enable-multibyte-characters t Gives me: Variable enable-multibyte-characters is read-only I don't recall ever seeinig that message come up when setting a var before. C-u C-x = on a character that looks like an `a' with two small dots over it followed by slash (\)200\234current date(a with dots)\200\235 character: â (0342, 226, 0xe2) charset: eight-bit-graphic (8-bit graphic char (0xA0..0xFF)) code point: 226 syntax: which means: whitespace category: buffer code: 0xE2 file code: 0xE2 (encoded by coding system utf-8) font: -Adobe-Courier-Bold-R-Normal--14-100-100-100-M-90-ISO8859-1