Subject: bug#7962: 23.2; capitalize letters ISO-8859-1 with diacritic signs in emacs 23.2.1

From: Sven Joachim <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 23:17:14 +0100

On 2011-02-03 22:39 +0100, Lennart Borgman wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 10:19 PM, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>> Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:49:22 +0100
>>> From: Emmanuel Bigler <[email-masked]>
>>> Cc:
>>>
>>> However I am reluctant to switch to UTF-8 for all my texts in English,
>>> German, French, even Icelandic etc... i.e. Western European languages,
>>> the only ones I'll ever typeset, which are perfectly handled in
>>> unibyte iso-8859-1.
>>
>> You seem to assume that going multibyte requires that your files be
>> encoded in UTF-8.  That simply isn't true.  The files can continue be
>> encoded in ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15; Emacs will decode them into its
>> internal representation when you visit the file and encode it back
>> when you save it.  You lose nothing.
>
> But does that require that you mark those files as coded in ISO-8859-1 etc?

For reliability, yes.  Otherwise Emacs cannot really know the encoding
and has to guess if a byte with value 164 means ¤ (ISO-8859-1) or €
(ISO-8859-15), for instance.  Converting the files to UTF-8 solves this
ambiguity, of course.

Sven