Re: Charset problem

[Christian Schröder]

Peter Dyballa wrote:
> > Is it possible to make Emacs send me the ISO-8859-1 encoded umlauts as 
> > UTF-8 characters?
>
> Of course. When you launch GNU Emacs make it see environment variable 
> LC_CTYPE be like de_DE.UTF-8. Then it would automatically switch to 
> UTF-8 use. Otherwise this statement in some init file can make it:
>
>     (prefer-coding-system    'utf-8)
>
> Problems can arise when the file-name-coding-system is now different ...

Ok, I seem to have found the cause for all of my problems. I have been 
using an Emacs init file for several years now, without ever having a 
closer look to it. It contained the following line:

(standard-display-european 1)

which I assume was useful long ago, but was now not only obsolete, but 
even harmful. After I removed this command from the init file the system 
behaves as expected. I now also finally see a correct mode line.

Thanks a lot for all your helpful comments. At least I have learned some 
tricks about how to find out what's going on.

Kind regards,
        Christian