Dear Kevin,

On 09.06.2010, at 05:43, Kevin Rodgers wrote:

> Please show us the insert statement.

(insert "Umlaut: ü")

> When visiting ~/.emacs, what does `C-h C RET' display?

* Emacs 23.2.1 Windows Server Enterprise 2007 (German)

Coding system for saving this buffer:
  - -- undecided-dos (alias: dos)
[...]
Coding system for terminal output:
  nil
Coding system for inter-client cut and paste:
  U -- utf-16le-dos
Defaults for subprocess I/O:
  decoding: U -- utf-8-dos (alias: mule-utf-8-dos)
[...]
  Process I/O	"[pP][lL][iI][nN][kK]"	(undecided-dos . undecided-dos)
				"[cC][mM][dD][pP][rR][oO][xX][yY]"
		(undecided-dos . undecided-dos)


* Aquamacs 2.0 Mac (English)

Coding system for saving this buffer:
  - -- undecided-unix (alias: unix)
[...]
Coding system for terminal output:
  U -- utf-8-unix (alias: mule-utf-8-unix)
Coding system for inter-client cut and paste:
  nil
Defaults for subprocess I/O:
  decoding: U -- utf-8-unix (alias: mule-utf-8-unix)
[...]
  Process I/O	nothing specified

> When point is before the umlaut character in the insert statement,
> what does `C-u C-x =' display?

* Emacs 23.2.1 Windows Server Enterprise 2007 (German)

        character: ü (252, #o374, #xfc)
preferred charset: iso-8859-1 (Latin-1 (ISO/IEC 8859-1))
       code point: 0xFC
           syntax: w 	which means: word
         category: .:Base, c:Chinese, j:Japanese, l:Latin
      buffer code: #xC3 #xBC
        file code: #xC3 #xBC (encoded by coding system utf-8-unix)
          display: by this font (glyph code)
    uniscribe:-outline-Courier New-normal-normal-normal-mono-13-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1 (#x81)

Character code properties: customize what to show
  name: LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
  old-name: LATIN SMALL LETTER U DIAERESIS
  general-category: Ll (Letter, Lowercase)
  decomposition: (117 776) ('u' '̈')

There are text properties here:
  face                 font-lock-string-face
  fontified            t


The Aquamacs output is identical, except for the line that says "uniscribe" on Windows, it says:

    nil:-apple-Monaco-medium-normal-normal-*-12-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1 (#x81)

> > With Emacs 23.2 (Windows) the Umlaut is not displayed correctly (in
> > the newly generated buffer), with Aquamacs 2.0 it works just
> > fine. With both Emacsen, the .emacs-file yields "utf-8-unix" in the
> > modeline and "utf-8" for the newly created buffer.
> >
> > Is this a bug or is it a coincidence that this works in Aquamacs?
> 
> There are a lot of variables to account for between the 2 platforms and
> the 2 Emacs versions.

And so it seems. The problem can probably be explained by the above the differences in the default coding systems, interesting.

Warm regards,
 Stefan
-- 
Dr. Stefan Vollmar, Dipl.-Phys.
Head of IT group
Max-Planck-Institut für neurologische Forschung
Gleuelerstr. 50, 50931 Köln, Germany
Tel.: +49-221-4726-213  FAX +49-221-4726-298
Tel.: +49-221-478-5713  Mobile: 0160-93874279
Email: vollmar@nf.mpg.de   http://www.nf.mpg.de