Re: encoding

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Alan <lngndvs@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 16:35:51 -0800 (PST)
> 
> By and large I have no need for multibyte encodings, but I do use
> diacritic character modifications, and have an occasional need to use
> greek characters, for example.  So I enabled UTF-8 encoding (without
> really understanding the full extend of what is implied).

What do you mean by "enabled UTF-8 encoding"?  What did you put in
your .emacs, exactly?  Is there anything there besides the 2 lines you
show in your message (on which I comment below)?

> A the text output of a certain program includes the following.  I will
> show it both as it appears in the terminal and as it appears in an
> emacs buffer:

How did the output of that program get to an Emacs buffer? please
describe the procedure used to insert the program's output into Emacs.

>   (standard-display-8bit 160 255)

Remove this line, it will (or does already) cause you trouble.

>   (setq-default coding-system-for-write 'utf-8)

It's much better to say

  (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

> Can someone point the way to a simple explanation of the (seeming)
> complexities of coding-systems for emacs?

That complexity is supposed to be largely transparent in the default
setup. So the simple rule of thumb for dealing with this is not to
make any customizations you don't understand.  I would suggest as the
first step to remove everything you added to your .emacs for any
encoding related problems, and see if any problems persist.  If they
do, come up here and explain them; it's quite possible that the
solutions you found are incorrect, and are now causing more trouble.