Re: coding problem char \217 etc

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Uwe Brauer <oub@mat.ucm.es>
> Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2018 14:57:36 +0100
> 
> >From time to time I obtain documents which look like
> 
> \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} 
>  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}      % Police contenant les caractres franais
> \usepackage{geometry}         % DŽfinir les marges
> %  \usepackage[francais]{babel}  % Placez ici une liste de langues, la
>                               % dernire Žtant la langue principale
> 
> % \pagestyle{headings}        % Pour mettre des enttes avec les titres
>                               % des subsections en haut de page
> 
> 
> Since I am not sure that the coding survives I write that as
> 
> \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} 
>  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}      % Police contenant les caract\217res fran\215ais
> \usepackage{geometry}         % D\216finir les marges
> %  \usepackage[francais]{babel}  % Placez ici une liste de langues, la
>                               % derni\217re \216tant la langue principale
> 
> % \pagestyle{headings}        % Pour mettre des ent\220tes avec les titres
>                               % des subsections en haut de page
> 
> 
> And I simple don't know who to deal with it

You need to tell Emacs to read the file with the correct decoding.  In
this case, I think this will do the trick:

  C-x RET c mac-roman RET C-x C-f FILE-NAME RET

> Any possibility how emacs could deal with this automatically?

Maybe.  It depends on your locale defaults and on whether you
customized those defaults (with the likes of prefer-coding-system).
Not every encoding can be reliably decoded, if the defaults defeat
that.

One way of avoiding the manual specification of the encoding is to use
the coding: tag inside the file, either on the first line or in the
file-local variables.