Weird behaviour of emacs

[David Sumbler <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't know whether this is an Emacs 21.3 bug, a Fedora Core 2 bug or
(most likely) an error in my set-up.  I've asked on comp.emacs, but
received no replies.

I have a file (originally received as an e-mail) containing some Greek
characters; I shall refer to these characters as (a).  The file is
coded in ISO-2022-JP.  I have also added the same Greek characters by
entering the Unicode values at the keyboard.  Let's call these
characters (b).

If I run Emacs (version 21.3) under X, (a) display correctly, but (b)
appear as hollow boxes.  On the other hand, if I run Emacs, as I
usually do, on a console (unicode enabled), (b) display correctly, and
(a) appear as the "replacement character" 0xfffd - exactly the
opposite behaviour to what happens under X.

In either case, if I try to save the file as utf-8, Emacs protests
that this will not work satisfactorily - specifically, it is the (a)
characters that cause the problem.  (Yet surely any characters should
be savable in utf-8 - in any case, (a) and (b) are meant to be the
same, so why aren't they?)

If I save the file in emacs-mule format, a lower case 'alpha' appears
as bytes [92 a6 c1] in case (a), and [9c f4 a7 b1] in case (b).  Other
characters show similar differences.

I've spent weeks trying to solve this, without success.  Can someone
point me in the direction of an explanation and/or solution?

David

-- 

David Sumbler


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