European Character Set Display

Some European languages use accented letters and other special symbols. The ISO 8859 Latin-1 character set defines character codes for many European languages in the range 160 to 255.

Emacs can display those characters according to Latin-1, provided the terminal or font in use supports them. The M-x standard-display-european command toggles European character display mode. With a numeric argument, M-x standard-display-european enables European character display if and only if the argument is positive. Load the library iso-syntax to specify the correct syntactic properties and case conversion table for the Latin-1 character set.

If your terminal does not support display of the Latin-1 character set, Emacs can display these characters as ASCII sequences which at least give you a clear idea of what the characters are. To do this, load the library iso-ascii.

Some operating systems let you specify the language you are using by setting a locale. Emacs handles one common special case of this: if your locale name for character types contains the string `8859-1' or `88591', Emacs automatically enables European character display mode and its syntax.

There are three different ways you can enter Latin-1 characters:

• If your keyboard can generate character codes 128 and up, representing ISO Latin-1 characters, execute the following expression to enable Emacs to understand them:

  (set-input-mode (car (current-input-mode))
                  (nth 1 (current-input-mode))
                  0)
  

• You can load the library iso-transl to turn the key C-x 8 into a "compose character" prefix for entry of the extra ISO Latin-1 printing characters. C-x 8 is good for insertion (in the minibuffer as well as other buffers), for searching, and in any other context where a key sequence is allowed. The ALT modifier key, if you have one, serves the same purpose as C-x 8; use ALT together with an accent character to modify the following letter.
• You can use ISO Accents mode. This minor mode is convenient if you enter non-ASCII ISO Latin-1 characters often. When this minor mode is enabled, the characters ``', `'', `"', `^', `/' and `~' modify the following letter by adding the corresponding diacritical mark to it, if possible. To enable or disable ISO Accents mode, use the command M-x iso-accents-mode. This command affects only the current buffer. To enter one of those six special characters while in ISO Accents mode, type the character, followed by a space. Some of those characters have a corresponding "dead key" accent character in the ISO Latin-1 character set; to enter that character, type the corresponding ASCII character twice. For example, " enters the Latin-1 character acute-accent (character code 0264). ISO Accents mode input is available whenever a key sequence is expected: for ordinary insertion, for searching, for the minibuffer, and for certain command arguments. In addition to the accented letters, you can use these special sequences in ISO Accents mode to enter certain other ISO Latin-1 characters:

  /A

  `A' with ring.

  ~C

  `C' with cedilla.

  ~D

  `D' with stroke.

  /E

  `AE' ligature.

  /a

  `a' with ring.

  ~c

  `c' with cedilla.

  ~d

  `d' with stroke.

  /e

  `ae' ligature.

  "s

  German sharp `s'.

  ~<

  Left guillemot.

  ~>

  Right guillemot.

  ~!

  Inverted exclamation mark.

  ~?

  Inverted question mark.