Re: local chars displayed as numbers

[Stefan Monnier]

>> I'm not sure this is right, because windows-1252 covers basically all bytes,
>> so there's no way to find out that a file is not in windows-1252.

> As Latin-1 (still) has a higher priority than windows-1252 (at least
> that's my understanding), windows-1252 will not be used unless there a
> bytes from the region x80-x9f.  (windows-1252 is a superset of Latin-1.
> They differ only this region, which is not used in Latin-1.)

Clearly, the issue is not latin-1 vs windows-1252, but windows-1252 vs
raw-text.

Maybe there won't be any harm to always use windows-1252 rather than
raw-text, but I'm not convinced, especially given the fact that in
a GNU/Linux environment files in windows-1252 encoding are rather uncommon
(email messages are another matter).

So I'd rather have a tool that explains what's going on, so that the user
can decide to use window-1252 if it's a good choice for her, rather than
force windows-1252 on all users most of whom won't ever edit a file with
window-1252 encoding.


        Stefan


PS: My remarks obviously assume a GNU/Linux environment.  Under w32, it
probably makes sense to place window-125x in the preferred coding systems,
just like it makes sense to put mac-roman under macosx.