PARTLY SOLVED. Thank you to people who responded. I have gotten part way through this. Temporarily, I am able to boot. I also have backups of my .emacs.el, so can check them out too. Thank you again, Alan On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 8:36 AM, Alan E. Davis wrote: > 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 > wrote: > >> "Alan E. Davis" 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 > > -- 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