unibyte buffers won't display latin-1 characters

[David Kuehling]

Hi,

I'm trying to edit compressed files using auto-compression-mode, which
always switches the buffer to unibyte.  Unfortunately I can't get Emacs
to display latin-1 characters in unibyte buffers, although the
documentation states that this is possible.

Here's what I did:

M-x set-variable <Ret> 
unibyte-display-via-language-environment <Ret> 
t <Ret>
M-x set-language-environment <Ret>
Latin-1 <Ret>
M-x auto-compression-mode <Ret>
C-x C-f test.txt.gz <Ret>

I then tried to enter äöü, and Emacs displayed \344\366\374.

Even if this is a small problem, the question remains, why gzipped files
are opened as unibyte.  This is extremely inconvenient.  I think that
also keeps me from reading japanese info files which are (in my Debian
Woody system) by default gzipped.  Emacs only displays them properly
when I gunzip them.

The hole problem also applys to crypt++.

Could anybody please shade some light on that topic?

David Kühling

PS: please CC, I'm not subscribed..
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