strange UTF8 encoding problem (relevant to decoding-system-gone-awry?)

[Nic Ferrier]

I've noted the current discussion on Emacs coding.


I am experiencing a strange problem with Emacs encoding which I
thought I might share.

I'm reading the tcpd package's hosts_acccess man page with Emacs man
from this version of Emacs:

  GNU Emacs 21.3.50.22 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.4.10) of
  2004-12-14


In the man page viewed on a terminal there are nice little bullet
characters. Hexdump shows these characters as B7 so obviously the
terminal is not UTF-8.

The UTF-8 sequence for B7 is 0301 0267.

When I view the man page in Emacs with utf-8 encoding on by default I
get a \267. Encoding the page as unix produces:  \302\267 which
*does* look like a valid UTF-8 byte sequence.

When I do (what-cursor-position) on the character I get 302 which is
the first byte in the sequence.

I'm not sure what Emacs is doing here. It looks like valid UTF-8 and
yet (what-cursor-position) obviously does not believe there is a UTF-8
character.

Anybody got any idea why the correct character doesn't display?


btw Woman display the manual page with the strange bullet converted to
an asterisk.


-- 
Nic Ferrier
http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk