Re: unicode trouble

[Carl Johnson <carlj@peak.org>]

Martin Lorenz <martin@lorenz.eu.org> writes:

> On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 11:06:41PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
> > also sprach Dipl.-Ing. Martin Lorenz <martin@lorenz.eu.org> [2005.04.13.2251 +0200]:
> > > displays completely correct in my terminal, but when i load it into
> > > emacs it dosen't even try to show unicode...
> > > 
> > > mutt on the other hand replaces every special character with a dotted
> > > box when the terminal is set to utf-8 mode. as soon as I set the
> > > terminal back to ISO-8859-1 german umlauts and such are displayed
> > > correctly.
> > 
> > Which terminal? You are lacking fonts, that's all.
> 
> gnome-terminal
> in xterm it seems to work somehow
> 
> but what about emacs?
> 
> the whole unicode stuff seems to work well in distributions my colleagues
> use around here (mainly Suse and Mandrake) 
> I seem to be the only one having troule to correctly set up UTF-8 as
> default character coding system.
> 
> this is especially annoying in joint document preparation in latex
> using svn for syncronizing. I am the one who allways sees garbage on his
> screen :-(

I use unicode with emacs21 from stable, but I suspect it works better
with newer versions.  I tried mule-ucs as another poster suggested,
but didn't have much luck with it.  Actually just emacs took some
experimenting, since it didn't work when I first tried it.

For some reason, unicode doesn't work when I just try and start emacs
from the menu, so I found that I have to start emacs from uxterm (not
xterm).  You can then kill the uxterm if you like (after disown).  I
don't know how many are necessary, but I have the following lines in
my .emacs:

        (setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
        (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
        (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
        (set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
        (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

Of course, with all that trouble, I just start emacs when I start X
and then leave it running.  You will also have to have your keyboard
set up to generate the proper unicode characters, or enable whichever
emacs keyboard mode that you want.  You also have to use a font that
has unicode characters, but the default font has everything that I
need.
-- 
Carl Johnson		carlj@peak.org