Emacs, terminal, and terminal coding schemes

Emacs, terminal, and terminal coding schemes

[Torsten Bronger]

Halloechen!

Just deleted my GNU Emacs 20 and installed
GNU Emacs 21.2.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)

I'm a console terminal user.  I mostly use it
in the XTerm ("Konsole 1.0.1 (KDE 2.1.2)"), but also in the
ordinary text mode terminal.

Two major problems:

1. My terminals use latin-9 (German environment).  My
   .emacs contains

(codepage-setup "850")
(prefer-coding-system 'cp850-dos)
(prefer-coding-system 'iso-latin-1)
; (set-language-environment "Latin-9")
 
(if (eq window-system nil) (set-terminal-coding-system 'latin-1))
(if (eq window-system nil) (set-keyboard-coding-system 'latin-1))

   But when I change this to "latin-9" all characters
   (even thost that are common in latin-1 and -9)
   turn into "?".  What am I doing wrong?

2. In the xterm, my keyboard layout must be latin-1
   apparently.  On the tty console this is wrong and
   should be cp850 instead.  How can I create
   .emacs code that can handle both?

Thank you!

Tschoe,
Torsten.

Re: Emacs, terminal, and terminal coding schemes

[Kai Großjohann]

Torsten Bronger <bronger@physik.rwth-aachen.de> writes:

>    But when I change this to "latin-9" all characters
>    (even thost that are common in latin-1 and -9)
>    turn into "?".  What am I doing wrong?

Well, with your settings you are editing Latin-1 text but tell Emacs
that your terminal displays Latin-9.  Emacs doesn't know that it some
Latin-1 characters look the same as some Latin-9 characters, so it
doesn't think it can display the Latin-1 chars in the
Latin-9-displaying terminal.

If your language environment would agree with the terminal, then it
would work better.

FWIW, I just set $LC_CTYPE to de_DE@euro and don't need to change
anything else.

-- 
~/.signature is: umop ap!sdn    (Frank Nobis)

Re: Emacs, terminal, and terminal coding schemes

[Jonathon Isaac Swiderski]

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kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de (Kai Großjohann) writes:
> Torsten Bronger <bronger@physik.rwth-aachen.de> writes:
> 
> >    But when I change this to "latin-9" all characters
> >    (even thost that are common in latin-1 and -9)
> >    turn into "?".  What am I doing wrong?
> 
> Well, with your settings you are editing Latin-1 text but tell Emacs
> that your terminal displays Latin-9.  Emacs doesn't know that it some
> Latin-1 characters look the same as some Latin-9 characters, so it
> doesn't think it can display the Latin-1 chars in the
> Latin-9-displaying terminal.
> 
> If your language environment would agree with the terminal, then it
> would work better.

I have set C-x RET t iso-latin-1 and C-x RET t iso-8859-1 (I've tried -9, too),
and Gnus (5.7/Emacs 20.7) still doesn't understand characters --- while Pine's
newsreader (whose coding system is set to iso-8859-1 also) correctly displays
accents, umlauts, etc. correctly, Gnus display's Kai's last name as
"Gro\337johann" or "=?iso-8859-1?q?G".  All this in the same terminal emulator,
PuTTY.

What settings/shell-variables do I need to fix this?

-- 
Jonathon Isaac Swiderski \\ dangercat-20@dangercat.net
cs.oberlin.edu/~jswiders  \\  www.dangercat.net/resume

"You know what really bothers me?  We're only able to keep 
you guys out of society for four years." - OC CompSci prof
"Hey! There's still grad school!"        - Student

Re: Emacs, terminal, and terminal coding schemes

[Kai Großjohann]

Jonathon Isaac Swiderski <jonswid@umich.edu> writes:

> I have set C-x RET t iso-latin-1 and C-x RET t iso-8859-1 (I've
> tried -9, too), and Gnus (5.7/Emacs 20.7) still doesn't understand
> characters --- while Pine's newsreader (whose coding system is set
> to iso-8859-1 also) correctly displays accents, umlauts,
> etc. correctly, Gnus display's Kai's last name as "Gro\337johann" or
> "=?iso-8859-1?q?G".  All this in the same terminal emulator, PuTTY.

If you see =?iso-8859-1?q?, then it's a different problem.  This is a
Mule encoding, and Gnus 5.7 does not grok Mule.

I recommend that you install Gnus 5.8 which does grok Mule.
-- 
~/.signature is: umop ap!sdn    (Frank Nobis)