Re: emacs displaying backslash incorrectly

[David Solimano]

On Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:42:51 +1000, Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>
wrote:

>lraae <lcraae@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Hi, I have a weird problem which I can't seem to find anything about
>> on the web: When I type a backslash, emacs displays it as a capital W
>> with a double strikethrough.
>>
>> This is Emacs 23.1.1 on Linux Fedora 12 (2.6.32.19-163.fc12.i686.PAE).
>>
>> I tried "emacs -q" to run without startup file, but the problem
>> remains. This is a school administered computer, so I don't have root
>> access.
>>
>> Hope someone might have an idea how to proceed in solving this.
>
>weird.
>
>This is only a wild stab in the dark, but maybe it is a font issue? If
>you enter a backslash and save it to a file and view it with something
>outside of emacs, does it show up as a backslash or some other key?
>
>Maybe try specifying a different font?
>
>Tim

Due some historical considerations with Japanese and Korean text
encoding, it does seem that some fonts place Won or Yen signs where
the backslash would usually be, eg:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2004/12/14/284838.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/10/12/479561.aspx

So it's not terribly surprising that a font would exhibit this
behavior.

David