11. Alternate character sets

11.1 How do I make Emacs display 8-bit characters?
11.2 How do I input eight-bit characters?
11.3 Where can I get an Emacs that handles kanji, Chinese, or other Far-Eastern character sets?
11.4 Where is an Emacs that can handle Semitic (right-to-left) alphabets?

11.1 How do I make Emacs display 8-bit characters?

See Info file `emacs', node `Single-Byte Character Support'. On a Unix, when Emacs runs on a text-only terminal display or is invoked with `emacs -nw', you typically need to use set-terminal-coding-system to tell Emacs what the terminal can display, even after setting the language environment; otherwise non-ASCII characters will display as `?'. On other operating systems, such as MS-DOS and MS-Windows, Emacs queries the OS about the character set supported by the display, and sets up the required terminal coding system automatically.

11.2 How do I input eight-bit characters?

Various methods are available for input of eight-bit characters. See See Info file `emacs', node `Single-Byte Character Support'. For more sophisticated methods, See Info file `emacs', node `Input Methods'.

11.3 Where can I get an Emacs that handles kanji, Chinese, or other Far-Eastern character sets?

Emacs 20 and later includes many of the features of MULE, the MULtilingual Enhancement to Emacs. See section 7.1 How do I install Emacs?, for information on where to find and download the latest version of Emacs.

11.4 Where is an Emacs that can handle Semitic (right-to-left) alphabets?

Emacs 20 and later supports Hebrew characters (ISO 8859-8), but does not yet support right-to-left character entry and display.

Joel M. Hoffman has written a Lisp package called `hebrew.el' that allows right-to-left editing of Hebrew. It reportedly works out of the box with Emacs 19, but requires patches for Emacs 18. Write to Joel if you want the patches or package.

`hebrew.el' requires a Hebrew screen font, but no other hardware support. Joel has a screen font for PCs running MS-DOS or GNU/Linux.

You might also try to query archie for files named with `hebrew'; several ftp sites in Israel may also have the necessary files.