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Date:	Thu, 17 Feb 2000 13:32:36 +0200 (EET)
From:	Esa A E Peuha <peuha AT cc DOT helsinki DOT fi>
Sender:	peuha AT cc DOT helsinki DOT fi
To:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
cc:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: Problems with Emacs 20.5
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On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> The *correct* answer to this is that `C-x 8' works for me in Emacs
> 20.5.  You need to set the keyboard coding system to latin-1, like
> this:
> 	C-x C-m k latin-1 RET
> 
> After that, you should be able to insert Latin-1 characters with 
> "C-x 8", like you'd expect.  (But if your codepage doesn't support
> some of the Latin-1 glyphs, they will be simulated by ASCII strings,
> like the manual describes.)  If this doesn't work for you, please post
> the details.

Thanks.  I guess I should have read the manual more carefully.

> The reason for the above setting is that `C-x 8' simulates a Latin-1
> character by, in effect, feeding Emacs with the Latin-1 8-bit code of
> the character as if you were typing that 8-bit code from the keyboard.
> Emacs needs to translate these 8-bit codes into its internal
> representation of non-ASCII characters, so it needs to know that the
> keyboard transmits Latin-1 codes.  That's what keyboard coding system
> is for.

So I figured, but it still seems rather counter-intuitive to me.  The
natural way to implement `C-x 8' would seem to be that it directly
generates codes in the internal representation, but I suppose there's
a reason why it wasn't implemented that way.  However, couldn't `C-x 8'
change the keyboard coding system temporarily while feeding the character?

> Btw, why are you using codepage 437?  I'd expect the machines in
> Western Europe to use cp850 by default, not cp437.

Because 437 is the codepage that is in my video card's ROM (and probably
in the ROMs of a great majority of video cards).  I'm not willing to waste
any DOS memory for cp850 as I don't need it.  Of course, that doesn't stop
DOS from incorrectly reporting the current codepage as 850...

-- 
Esa Peuha
student of mathematics at the University of Helsinki
http://www.helsinki.fi/~peuha/

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