Re: Charset problem

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Christian_Schr=F6der?= <chschroe@math.uni-goettingen.de>
> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 01:05:19 +0200
> 
> My problem is as follows: I log into my SuSE 10.2 linux server from my 
> Windows box using PuTTY. I then use GNU Emacs (in text mode) to edit 
> files on the linux box.

You haven't supplied enough information about your systems to
intelligently guess what might be your problem.  One piece of info
that is missing is the locales of your SuSE server and of your Windows
box.

> I have some old files which are encoded in ISO-8859-1. When I open these 
> files in Emacs the german umlauts are displayed as question marks.

Go to one of those question marks and type "C-u C-x =".  Then tell
here what Emacs has to say about those characters.

Also, what does Emacs show in the left edge of the mode line.  There's
a character there that says what Emacs thinks about the encoding of
the file, and what encoding it uses for displaying characters on the
terminal (see the user manual, node "Mode Line", for explanations
about these).  What do you see there when you visit the ISO-8859-1
encoded files?

> I have tried to set PuTTY's translation to both UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1

Are you talking about the Window->Translation page in the PuTTY's
session configuration dialog?

Did you click the "Save" button on the "Session" page, after changing
those settings, and then restarted the session?  If not, the new
settings might not be in effect.

> PuTTY seems to send an ISO-8859-1 encoded character when I set the 
> translation to ISO-8859-1.

The "translation" setting is not for sending, it's for receiving: it
tells PuTTY what font to use when it gets characters with the 8th bit
set.

> So which way do my characters take before they get into the file? How 
> many translation steps are done, and by whom? Are there any Emacs 
> variables that must be set?

Before answering these questions, we need to know the information
about your locales.  It's hard to help you before that, except by wild
guessing.