Re: utf8 char display in buffer

[Lewis Perin <perin@panix.com>]

ken <gebser@mousecar.com> writes:

> [...]
> Lewis,
> 
> Thanks for posting.  It's lonely out there when you're the only one with
> a particular problem.

The few, the proud...

> To make sure we're suffering the same cyber-indignity, here's the
> scenario as I see it (from an older version of emacs running on
> Linux):
> 
> 0) Some others and myself want to include some non-English characters in
> a file being edited in emacs. Problems arise, however:
> 
> 1) In a buffer which is already utf-8 encoded, I set the appropriate
> input method, type in the desired characters. They display just peachy
> and there is happiness in EmacsLand.
> 
> 2) I save the buffer to a file, then close the buffer.
> 
> 3) I visit the same file (i.e., load it again into emacs). Because it
> has &lt;!-- -*- coding: utf-8; -*- --&gt; as the first line, it opens
> utf-8 encoded. This is confirmed by the presence of a 'u' as the second
> character in the status bar.

I haven't been inserting that special first line.

> 4) The text in the buffer displays fine, except that in place of each of
> those non-English characters is a little empty box. With the cursor on
> one of those boxes, an 'a' with a horizontal bar above it, doing "C-x
> =", emacs returns "Char: ā (01210041, 331809, 0x51021, file ...)".
> (While, in emacs the character after "Char:" is a little box, if I load
> this same file into Firefox, that same character appears as it should,
> as an 'a' with a horizontal bar above it. How it appears in your email
> client will depend upon your email client.)

My situation differs in that most of the non-ASCII characters (Chinese
in my case) come through just fine.  But the ones that don't have
those irritating boxes in place of the correct glyphs.

/Lew
---
Lew Perin / perin@acm.org
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html