Re: Reading national characters in filenames on Mac OS X?

[Piet van Oostrum]

>>>>> kai.grossjohann@gmx.net (Kai Großjohann) (KG) wrote:

KG> Piet van Oostrum <piet@cs.uu.nl> writes:
>> You can open and create the files and directories properly with the utf-8
>> file-name-coding. The only thing is dired will not display the filename
>> properly. This is because Mac OSX uses normalised UTF-8 for the filenames,
>> which means that the accent character is separated from the letter and put
>> behind it. And Emacs UTF-8 implementation doesn't understand this.

KG> Ah, I didn't know what was meant by «normalized UTF-8».  It's a pity
KG> that Emacs doesn't grok it.

I should have said:  Normalised Unicode rather than normalised UTF-8.
Although in the Mac filesystem of course each character arising from the
normalisation is encoded as UTF-8.

The Mac OSX system has functions to do the conversion in both directions
(for filenames), so it would in principle be possible to display filenames
properly. However, dired mode just puts the output of ls in the buffer, It
just assumes that ls outputs proper characters. So to have utf-8 recognise
the `decomposed' characters would be best.
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet@cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~piet [PGP]
Private email: P.van.Oostrum@hccnet.nl