Re: Problem with UTF-8

[Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de>]

Konstantinos Efstathiou <cefstat@purple.univ-littoral.fr> writes:

> When writing the file:
>
>    character: .[alpha] (05541, 2913, 0xb61, U+03B1).-A
>      charset: greek-iso8859-7
[...]
>      display: by this font (glyph code)
>       -etl-fixed-medium-r-normal--14-140-75-75-m-140-iso8859-7 (0xE1)
>
> After saving and reopening the file:
>
>    character: .[square] (01211661, 332721, 0x513b1, U+03B1).-A
>      charset: mule-unicode-0100-24ff
[...]
>      display: no font avairable

I see. It is a font problem. You need to create a fontset in order to
solve it. Look for an appropriate ISO 10646-1 font and set Emacs up to
use it for the charset mule-unicode-0100-24ff. For example this should
work on GNU/Linux:

(create-fontset-from-fontset-spec "\ 
-b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-konstantinos,\ 
latin-iso8859-15:-b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1,\ 
mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-*-fixed-medium-r-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1") 

(set-face-font 'default "fontset-konstantinos")

Maybe there is a ISO 10646 variant of the ETL font that you are using?

Some people prefer to do it via X-ressources, but I don't use that and
I am too lazy to look the syntax up in the manual.

What is happening? Emacs internal encoding (emacs-mule) is divided
into several so-called "charsets". Every character in a buffer belongs
to a charset and some charsets contain the same (abstract)
characters. The Greek input method you use obviously inserts chars
from `greek-iso8859-7'. (Some or all (?) of the input methods for
classical Greek, for example, use `mule-unicode-0100-24ff'.) Font
resolving and similar things depend on those charsets. When you save
the file as UTF-8, then Emacs knows how to generate the appropriate
UTF-8 octets for the charset `greek-iso8859-7'. But when you visit it
again, then Emacs does not decode those UTF-8 octets to characters
belonging to `greek-iso8859-7', but to chars from
`mule-unicode-0100-24ff'. This is actually a good thing. It's just a
font issue that you don't see the right glyphs for those characters.


    Oliver
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