different distro [was: Re: garbage chars when pasting French chars into emacs]

[ken <gebser@mousecar.com>]

On 02/03/2012 02:31 AM Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:00:37 -0500
>> From: ken <gebser@mousecar.com>
>>
>>>> ....
>>
>> Select one of the following safe coding systems:
>>    iso-2022-jp-2 x-ctext iso-2022-7bit raw-text emacs-mule no-conversion
>>    ctext-no-compositions iso-2022-8bit-ss2 iso-2022-7bit-lock
>>    iso-2022-7bit-ss2 tibetan-iso-8bit-with-esc thai-tis620-with-esc
>>    lao-with-esc korean-iso-8bit-with-esc hebrew-iso-8bit-with-esc
>>    greek-iso-8bit-with-esc iso-latin-9-with-esc iso-latin-8-with-esc
>>    iso-latin-5-with-esc iso-latin-4-with-esc iso-latin-3-with-esc
>>    iso-latin-2-with-esc iso-latin-1-with-esc
>>    in-is13194-devanagari-with-esc cyrillic-iso-8bit-with-esc
>>    chinese-iso-8bit-with-esc japanese-iso-8bit-with-esc
>> ===================================================================
>>
>> Entering "utf-8" into the minibuffer, of course, doesn't work.  Frankly, 
>> I'd like to save into utf-8
> 
> You can't, not with Emacs 21.  In that version, the same character in
> different character sets was treated as 2 different characters.  Also,
> the mule-utf-8 character set didn't include the Latin-1 characters.
> 
> The only suggestion I have is to try iso-latin-1-with-esc (you will
> see above that this is one of the possibilities suggested by Emacs),
> it should at least produce a Latin-1 encoded file, which will be
> easier on you later.
> 
> You really need to upgrade your Emacs, if you want to use UTF-8.

Thanks, Eli, for all the good advice.

I was using v.22 previously, but was hoping to stay with the standard 
(CentOS/Red Hat) distribution.  This situation and your insight have 
convinced me I've got to use a more recent emacs.  I'm thinking now of 
doing an edgier distro, some rpm/yum based thing like Fedora. 
Suggestions appreciated.

Thanks again to all for the great tips.