copy-paste worked lol.  I feel like such an idiot.  Thanks Axel! (and everyone else who participated in the thread) -ts1971 ________________________________ From: Axel E. Retif To: Tech Stuff Cc: "help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org" Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 7:59 PM Subject: Re: File Encoding Issue on Windows On 03/13/2013 08:35 PM, Tech Stuff wrote: > So, having played around a bit more I do have to make one correction. > It does appear that now I am able to enter the extended characters > supported by the US International keyboard, even in the mini-buffer. Yes, I also use an US keyboard (an Apple US Keyboard, in fact, both in Linux and Mac) for Spanish text. > I still > have the general problem though.  How do I for instance enter the > character at codepoint 173 which is a soft hyphen (whatever that is) > into the mini buffer? That I don't know (copy-paste?). But I usually enter UTF-8 characters with C-X 8 RET; for example, to get an em dash,     C-X 8 RET em dash RET or, to get an Â, as per Peter's table,     C-X 8 RET 00C2 RET. See http://emacswiki.org/emacs/UnicodeEncoding Best Axel