Re: latex files encoding

[Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no>]

+ Alain Muls <alain.muls@telenet.be>:

| I have numerous latex files I created using kile. The encoding is (I
| think) sat to UTF-8 or UTF-16. Since I like auctex, reftex, etc I
| decided to return to emacs, an editor I used until 2 years ago.
|
| Now I have a problem with the encoding of these files. As an example,
| the ë (e diacritic ?) is shown as ï. How can I get emacs to respect
| the encoding of the files.

The hard way:  Type C-x C-m c  and specify utf-8 for the coding
system, and immediately follow this by C-x C-f to find the file.

The easy way:  Put a comment on the first line of your latex files:
% -*- coding: utf-8; -*-

If you want the utf-8 encoding on every tex file you can do
something like

  (push '("[.]tex$" . utf-8) file-coding-system-alist)

(er, push is part of the cl package, so you need (require 'cl) first,
or rewrite to the equivalent non-cl elisp - which I admit I am too
lazy to figure out right now).

You can still override that with C-x C-m c if you encounter a
non-utf-8 latex file.

And finally, you can convert your utf-8 encoded tex files to latin-1
(if possible) by first reading them after using C-x C-m c utf-8 RET
and then changing the coding system using C-c C-m f and specifying
latin-1, whereupon you save the file.  (You'd better edit the
\usepackage[...]{inputenc} in the source file accordingly.)

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell