Re: Charset problem

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Christian_Schr=F6der?= <chschroe@math.uni-goettingen.de>
> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:50:52 +0200
> 
> These are the locale settings on my server:
> LANG=posix
> LC_CTYPE="posix"
> LC_NUMERIC="posix"
> LC_TIME="posix"
> LC_COLLATE="posix"
> LC_MONETARY="posix"
> LC_MESSAGES="posix"
> LC_PAPER="posix"
> LC_NAME="posix"
> LC_ADDRESS="posix"
> LC_TELEPHONE="posix"
> LC_MEASUREMENT="posix"
> LC_IDENTIFICATION="posix"
> LC_ALL=

I think this is your problem, right there: on a Posix locale, Emacs
disables all its automagic for non-ASCII characters, and expects you
to tell it explicitly what to do, which is a pain.

Can you set up an ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-10 locale?  If not, why not?
I'd expect that users in Germany use a German locale.

>      character: ? (0374, 252, 0xfc)
>        charset: eight-bit-graphic (8-bit graphic char (0xA0..0xFF))

That's expected on a Posix locale, I think: Emacs treats any non-ASCII
characters as meaningless bytes.

> This is what I expected because the character is a german "u-umlaut".

No, you should expect Emacs to detect that this is an ISO-8859-1
character, not an eight-bit-graphic character.

> > 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?
> 
> -:---F1  join.php       11:33PM 0.19   (PHP Abbrev)--L10--C30--Top-----------
> 
> So it seems to be "no code conversion".

Also expected for a Posix locale.

> I tried to change the coding 
> system for keyboard and/or terminal, but it did not change anything. It 
> seems as if I still don't understand what's happening. :(

Try "M-x set-language-environment RET Latin-1 RET".  Does this help?

> > 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.
> 
> Yes, I have read this in the manual, but I have also found some 
> references where it says that the same encoding is used for sending.

Not with Emacs.  Emacs encodes everything by itself.