Dear Eli, > What encoding was that file in originally? What does Emacs > display in the left edge of the mode line?
"-t\---" > More accurately, something weird is going on for _your_ existing > files. I suspect that, being edited by CodeWright, they, too, > include random 8-bit bytes that don't fir with any known encoding, > or at least not with encodings Emacs tries in your environment. No, CodeWright does not insert any additional bytes, as I've verified with a hex dump of the file. It's a Windows 3.1 editor from 1994. It's just a simple ascii editor. > Your conclusion is wrong, so you are asking a wrong question, for > which there's no answer. > Let me begin by asking you what codepage was used (by CodeWright, > I presume) for characters whose 8th bit is set, i.e. for > characters whose codes are above 127 decimal? If it was codepage > 850, you could try "C-x RET c cp850 RET C-x C-f" to visit the file > and tell Emacs to decode it as codepage 850. Or maybe you should > try codepage 437. (All these are guesses; if you tell me in what > locale you set up your machine, I may guess better.) This helps. I tried using "windows-1252" as the codepage and it gave the result that I wanted. Any suggestions for the best macro/form to make that the default? Thanks. John P.S.: If anyone wants to experiment with this problem, here's some typical standard text from internet news stories: > Under Deng Xiaopings leadership, China had been opening up. The > countrys unspoken support for the US had spurred the collapse of > the Soviet Union. China and the US had been sharing both > geopolitical and military secrets, recalls Gao Zhikai, Dengs > former translator. Because of that co-operation, China was > following a US line. The US had even been selling China weapons, > both Sikorsky helicopters and guidance systems for jet aircraft. > Four months into a crusade against Internet pornography, the > government is closing thousands of sitessome pornographic, some > notand tightening rules on who can register Web addresses inside > China. > View Full Image China Internet Agence France-Presse -- Customers > surf the Web at an Internet café in Wuhu, central China, in a > photo taken in February. A backlash against Beijing's moves to > block access to the Internet has spurred attempts by many users to > 'scale' the so-called Great Firewall of censorship. China Internet > China Internet The above is typical news story text, containing several 8-bit ascii characters, including curly-quotes, m-dashes and e-acute. (é) It displays correctly with the windows-1252 encoding. [End of message]
