Re: Multibyte chars

[Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de>]

Harry Putnam <hgp@sbcglobal.net> writes:

> Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de> writes:
[...]
>> 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: <usms1uvdb.fsf@ID-87814.user.dfncis.de>
>
> 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.

Yes, that's expected for `enable-multibyte-characters'. (Though I
don't know how it is implemented, not having read the code.) You can
toggle a buffer between multibyte and unibyte with the command
`M-x toggle-enable-multibyte-characters'. But I believe that this
should normally not be necessary. Emacs uses multibyte buffers by
default. Do you start it with the "--unibyte" command line option? Or
do you have `(standard-display-european t)' somewhere in you .emacs?

Toggling with `toggle-e-m-characters' when Gnus displays the article
won't help, because the strange characters and numbers that you see
are probably the UTF-8 representation interpreted as unibyte
characters. So the article was not decoded in the first
place. Toggling multibyte will only help, if the UTF-8 got decoded to
Emacs' internal multibyte representation (emacs-mule). 

But I think that all this will just work, if you find out what causes
your Emacs to use a unibyte buffer.

    Oliver
-- 
19 Floréal an 211 de la Révolution
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!