Re: local chars displayed as numbers

[Reiner Steib]

On Fri, Sep 22 2006, Stefan Monnier wrote:

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

It wasn't clear to me. ;-)

> 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).

I don't think it uncommon.  People migrate from Windows to GNU/Linux
(or switch between both), people exchange files with Windows users,
... (and on Windows, it's quite common to insert `smart quotes' and
other non-Latin-1 characters).

> 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.

What is the benefit to treat it as raw-text instead of window-1252
assuming that the file only contains characters from window-1252?  We
are taking about a file (> 300000 chars of text) with mostly ASCII,
some Latin-1 [ÄÖÜäöüß] (1.3%, probably typical for a German text), and
19 \202 characters (= 0.005%).

(I don't know if Emacs really checks the frequency of such characters
to decide about the coding.)

> 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.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
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