Comments on: XEmacs and umlauts — setting the character encoding to UTF-8 http://promberger.info/linux/2007/05/29/xemacs-and-umlauts-setting-to-utf-8/ my outsourced memory for your perusal Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:02:13 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Sima http://promberger.info/linux/2007/05/29/xemacs-and-umlauts-setting-to-utf-8/comment-page-1/#comment-4192 Sima Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:52:48 +0000 http://www.promberger.de/blog/index.php/2007/05/29/xemacs-and-umlauts-setting-to-utf-8/#comment-4192 A bit too late perhaps but here's what I did to get UTF-8 as default and used when needed. In .emacs add (set-language-environment "UTF-8") I think Emacs does some kind of lazy evaluation, it won't "use" UTF-8 unless needed. Since many chars in Latin-1 (and other encodings) are the same in UTF-8, the file will show as Latin-1 but still be readable as UTF-8. UTF-8 will be used as soon as you input a special character not in the lazy char set. At least this is how it works for me. Source: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/LanguageEnvironment A bit too late perhaps but here’s what I did to get UTF-8 as default and used when needed. In .emacs add
(set-language-environment “UTF-8″)

I think Emacs does some kind of lazy evaluation, it won’t “use” UTF-8 unless needed. Since many chars in Latin-1 (and other encodings) are the same in UTF-8, the file will show as Latin-1 but still be readable as UTF-8. UTF-8 will be used as soon as you input a special character not in the lazy char set. At least this is how it works for me.

Source: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/LanguageEnvironment

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