Representation of non-ascii keys in emacs?

[Peter Daum]

Hi,

Peter Daum wrote:

> Here a minimal code snippet to illustrate the problem:
> 
> (defun latin1-to-emacs (char-code)
>   (make-char 'latin-iso8859-1 (- char-code 128)))
> (setq c_ae (latin1-to-emacs 228))
> (local-set-key (make-vector 1 c_ae) "ae")
> 
> This should bind the key labeled "ä" to instead insert "ae". technically,
> it still works on emacs 21.4 in Etch ((current-local-map) indicates the
> change) but the key still produces "ä".


as I could meanwhile figure out, in the Debian Emacs21, the key labeled
"ä" is represented just by its iso8859-1 value (as also generally has been the
case for emacs versions before 21), so the example above could be simply:

   (local-set-key (make-vector 1 228) "ae")

But as far as I can see, this is only for the Debian emacs21 package (and I
still could not figure out, which modification is responsible for that) while
all other emacsens I tried (including version 22.1) still need

   (make-char 'latin-iso8859-1 (- char-code 128)

to get the emacs representation of a given iso8859-1 value.

Does anybody know what is going on here? Is this just a configuration option
set differently in Debian emacs? Is there any simpler/more portable way to
bind non-ascii keys?


Regards,
                        Peter Daum