[Bug: 21.4.19] utf-8 encoding

[stephen at xemacs.org]

Matthias M. Weber writes:

 > If I edit an ordinary plain text *.tex-file with xemacs 21.4.19 one or
 > two - not more! - out of about 15,000 German Umlauts (ä, ö, ü etc.) in
 > the file are not saved with their correct utf-8 two-byte hex codes
 > (e. g. "ü" = "c3 b3") but with a 3 (!) byte garbled hex code (e.g. "ü"
 > = "ef bf bd"), which, of course, causes a stop of the latex
 > interpreter ("no \u8 symbol").

That's the Unicode "replacement character".  It means that for some
reason XEmacs did not recognize the character properly (from what you
say it sounds like some kind of buffering problem).

Basically, Unicode is unsupported on 21.4.  There is an add-on package
called Mule-UCS which gives pretty good support.  Presumably you are
using that.  But that package is orphaned, and written in an obscure
dialect of a language which is itself orphaned.  Maybe this problem
can get fixed, but I would not bet on it.  Those of use who care a lot
about Unicode are all devoting most of our effort to 21.5 development.

If you plan to use Unicode on a daily basis, you should switch to
either XEmacs 21.5, or to GNU Emacs.  I'm sorry I can't be more help,
but I can't promise to fix this, either.

Steve