Re: Unknown character encodings in .emacs

["Alan E. Davis" <lngndvs@gmail.com>]

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Thank you very much, Nikolaj and Peter:

As of now, I see:
GDM_LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Emacs can read .emacs.el now, I have incrementally deleted or commented out
parts that emacs tripped over when reading .emacs . I also placed the header
into the file that peter suggested.

       ;; -*- mode: Emacs-Lisp; coding: utf-8; -*-

Now the question comes up: what is the most appropriate coding system to be
using?  I guess that is a matter for another post.  Or is it?  Should I be
using a two-byte language encoding at all?  All characters I ordinarily use
are availalbe in a latin-1 encoding.  The original reason I turned to a text
editor is the need for raw text input and output for language data (I was
working on a lexicon of Chuukese at the time).

I also was put off by the Windows encodings that emacs recommended when a
file was being saved.  I avoid all proprietary file formats, so felt  a bit
taken aback by that suggestion.

I have started to read more about this problem/issue.  I have gotten away
with a sloppy .emacs.el file for a while, and sloppy conventions on
encoding.  I need to look into it now.  However, it is not something I would
choose to spend a great deal of time on: it's only of secondary importance
to my work.

It is suspicious that the problem only recently happened.  The first
instance I discovered was a cut and paste from firefox of snippets for a
.emacs.  I've been using this same .emacs.el (with many changes and
additions) for 15 years, all on GNU/Linux systems.  I have had to adapt, but
nothing this radical.



Thank you again,

Alan



On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 4:38 AM, Nikolaj Schumacher <n_schumacher@web.de>
wrote:

> "Alan E. Davis" <lngndvs@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'be been poking around, but don't have a clue where to start.
> > I never did understand encoding
>
> Well, that's a clue where to start, I suppose. :)
>
> >     ("a`" "á" nil 1)
>
> Looks like the file has been written using UTF-8 and read using
> Latin-1.  Try adding:
>
> (set-language-environment "UTF-8")
>
> However, I believe this shouldn't be necessary if the system is
> configured correctly.  What OS do you use?
>
>
> regards,
> Nikolaj Schumacher
>



-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan lngndvs@gmail.com

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man

"We have no art. We do everything as well as we can." ---Balinese saying

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