>>> "SM" == Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> A friend of mine posses a lot of hebrew latex files which still use
>> 8859-8 coding. Understandable he wants to switch to UTF8 and xelatex.
> [...]
>> \documentclass[11pt]{article}
>> %\usepackage[8859-8]{inputenc}

> How does his TeX system know that this file is using 8859-8?
> Normally, the `inputenc` package above does that, but it's
> commented out.


I asked this myself, and came to the conclusion 
the culmus package does this. But I am not sure

> If you uncomment it, Emacs should also automatically recognize that the
> file is using iso-8859-8 and display the file as intended.

Good point tried it out. Using texstudio to save it.

But still Emacs does not recognize this file as hebrew.

Uwe