Re: Unknown character encodings in .emacs

[Alan E. Davis]

Thank you very much, Nikolaj and Peter:

As of now, I see:
GDM_LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Emacs can read .emacs.el now, I have incrementally deleted or commented out parts that emacs tripped over when reading .emacs . I also placed the header into the file that peter suggested.

       ;; -*- mode: Emacs-Lisp; coding: utf-8; -*-

Now the question comes up: what is the most appropriate coding system to be using?  I guess that is a matter for another post.  Or is it?  Should I be using a two-byte language encoding at all?  All characters I ordinarily use are availalbe in a latin-1 encoding.  The original reason I turned to a text editor is the need for raw text input and output for language data (I was working on a lexicon of Chuukese at the time).   

I also was put off by the Windows encodings that emacs recommended when a file was being saved.  I avoid all proprietary file formats, so felt  a bit taken aback by that suggestion.  

I have started to read more about this problem/issue.  I have gotten away with a sloppy .emacs.el file for a while, and sloppy conventions on encoding.  I need to look into it now.  However, it is not something I would choose to spend a great deal of time on: it's only of secondary importance to my work.

It is suspicious that the problem only recently happened.  The first instance I discovered was a cut and paste from firefox of snippets for a .emacs.  I've been using this same .emacs.el (with many changes and additions) for 15 years, all on GNU/Linux systems.  I have had to adapt, but nothing this radical.  



Thank you again,

Alan

On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 4:38 AM, Nikolaj Schumacher <n_schumacher@web.de> wrote:

"Alan E. Davis" <lngndvs@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'be been poking around, but don't have a clue where to start.
> I never did understand encoding

Well, that's a clue where to start, I suppose. :)

>     ("a`" "á" nil 1)

Looks like the file has been written using UTF-8 and read using
Latin-1.  Try adding:

(set-language-environment "UTF-8")

However, I believe this shouldn't be necessary if the system is
configured correctly.  What OS do you use?


regards,
Nikolaj Schumacher

-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan lngndvs@gmail.com 

"It's never a matter of liking or disliking ..."
 ---Santa Ynez Chumash Medicine Man

"We have no art. We do everything as well as we can." ---Balinese saying