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(emacs)International

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International Character Set Support
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   Emacs supports a wide variety of international character sets,
including European variants of the Latin alphabet, as well as Chinese,
Cyrillic, Devanagari (Hindi and Marathi), Ethiopic, Greek, Hebrew, IPA,
Japanese, Korean, Lao, Thai, Tibetan, and Vietnamese scripts.  These
features have been merged from the modified version of Emacs known as
MULE (for "MULti-lingual Enhancement to GNU Emacs")

   Emacs also supports various encodings of these characters used by
other internationalized software, such as word processors and mailers.

   Emacs allows editing text with international characters by supporting
all the related activities:

   * You can visit files with non-ASCII characters, save non-ASCII
     text, and pass non-ASCII text between Emacs and programs it
     invokes (such as compilers, spell-checkers, and mailers).  Setting
     your language environment (Note: Language Environments) takes
     care of setting up the coding systems and other options for a
     specific language or culture.  Alternatively, you can specify how
     Emacs should encode or decode text for each command; see Note:
     Specify Coding.

   * You can display non-ASCII characters encoded by the various
     scripts.  This works by using appropriate fonts on X and similar
     graphics displays (Note: Defining Fontsets), and by sending
     special codes to text-only displays (Note: Specify Coding).  If
     some characters are displayed incorrectly, refer to Note:
     Undisplayable Characters, which describes possible problems and
     explains how to solve them.

   * You can insert non-ASCII characters or search for them.  To do
     that, you can specify an input method (Note: Select Input
     Method) suitable for your language, or use the default input
     method set up when you set your language environment.  (Emacs
     input methods are part of the Leim package, which must be
     installed for you to be able to use them.)  If your keyboard can
     produce non-ASCII characters, you can select an appropriate
     keyboard coding system (Note: Specify Coding), and Emacs will
     accept those characters.  Latin-1 characters can also be input by
     using the `C-x 8' prefix, see Note: C-x 8.
  On X Window systems, your locale should be set to an
     appropriate value to make sure Emacs interprets keyboard input
     correctly, see Note: locales.

   The rest of this chapter describes these issues in detail.

International Chars

Basic concepts of multibyte characters.

Enabling Multibyte

Controlling whether to use multibyte characters.

Language Environments

Setting things up for the language you use.

Input Methods

Entering text characters not on your keyboard.

Select Input Method

Specifying your choice of input methods.

Multibyte Conversion

How single-byte characters convert to multibyte.

Coding Systems

Character set conversion when you read and

write files, and so on.

Recognize Coding

How Emacs figures out which conversion to use.

Specify Coding

Various ways to choose which conversion to use.

Fontsets

Fontsets are collections of fonts

that cover the whole spectrum of characters.

Defining Fontsets

Defining a new fontset.

Undisplayable Characters

When characters don't display.

Single-Byte Character Support

You can pick one European character set to use without multibyte characters.