Re: [AUCTeX] wrong encoding for *output* buffer

[David Kastrup]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> writes:

>>> The only thing which looks strange to me is that, the mode line in
>>> the `*xxx output* buffer starts with
>>>
>>>  1:**
>>> (but the UTF-8 contents of the log file as emitted by XeTeX is
>>> correctly displayed).
>> 
>> In that case, latin-1 is the coding system for saving that buffer
>> and utf-8 is for decoding the output from external process.  Of
>> several coding systems, the one for saving the buffer is the most
>> important for most cases, so usually only that one is displayed in
>> the mode line.
>
> Thanks for the explanation, which I already knew :-)
>
> My question was probably not precise enough: I wonder why auctex
> doesn't set the buffer encoding also (derived from the master file's
> local variables), given that auctex itself generates the *xxx output*
> buffer.

TeX is an 8-bit program wrapping its output, including output containing
quotes of the source as error locators, every 79bytes, irrespective of
character boundaries?  It also may encode some bytes in the middle of a
character as ^^xx .  Interpreting its output thus relies on the output
actually being interpretable in the given encoding.  We might have a bit
more leeway here with XEmacs out of the race (XEmacs' utf-8 encoding and
reencoding was not round-trippable).

-- 
David Kastrup