Re: replacing characters and whacky trans-buffer conversion

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 09.03.2007 um 16:54 schrieb ken:

> Much of what I do entails copying & yanking
> text into an existing emacs buffer.  I might do this a number of times
> into the same file and each of the coding types of the insertions  
> might
> be different.  If there were one particular encoding type in emacs  
> which
> would display all possible other encoding types properly and allow  
> me to
> edit that file, I would try that and maybe even change all my files to
> that.  But I doubt that capability exists (or ever will in my current
> lifetime).

There definitely is! I have test files encoded in 20 or 30 encodings  
(ISO 8859, some Mac, Adobe PostScript, NeXT, UTF-8, some MS Windows).  
In Mac OS X for example, without GNOME, it works without flaw to  
copy&paste between buffers of the same Emacs, between X clients, and  
between X and Aqua (Apple's "Display PDF" windowing system) clients –  
provided one thing: the contents you paste into some buffer fits into  
this buffer's encoding! Otherwise you get empty boxes ...


GNU Emacs uses internally a particular encoding for text. Depending  
on the coding system you have chosen (by default or deliberately) you  
can get different presentations of the same content. A problem are  
Mac, NeXT, and MS encodings: they use the area of 8 bit control  
characters (U+0080...U+009F) to encode "real" characters. So they  
have 32 entities more than the more useful ISO Latin (ISO 8859-x)  
encodings. Copying from them and pasting into ISO Latin buffers can  
easily fail because many of these "proprietary" characters cannot be  
found in ISO Latin. For example EN or EM DASH, DOUBLE QUOTATION  
MARKs ...


UTF-8 or the iso-2022-x encodings offer some kind of 'one encoding  
fits all' ...

--
Greetings

  Pete

Eat the rich – the poor are tough and stringy.