Re: [tlug] Stymied by emacs character display

[Stuart Luppescu <lupp@example.com>]

On Tue, 2019-02-19 at 17:30 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Stuart Luppescu writes:
> 
>  > I'm generating a report from an rmarkdown document
> 
> What language(s) are contained in this document?  What is it encoded
> in (UTF-8 I'm pretty sure, but confirmation would be nice)?

This is kind of complicated. The original R program (which contains the
strings copied and pasted from MS Word), is ascii, which writes the
control file for the analysis software and is utf-8. The analysis
program runs in Windows and produces an output file which is windows-
1252. Then a python script extracts some tables (utf-8) for inclusion
in the rmarkdown report, which is ascii.

>  > When I try to generate the report I get error messages like this:
>  > ! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:\200€ not set up for
> use
>  > with LaTeX.
> 
> That's clearly from LaTeX, not Emacs.  Which LaTeX extension are you
> using to process Unicode?  Have you tried others (XeLaTeX, LuaTeX,
> LaTeXCJK)?
> 
> The message is hard to make sense of.  My best guess is that the file
> got corrupted somehow and you have a lonely "€" (which has decimal
> value 128 or octal value 200) in it somewhere.  That byte is legal
> only as a traling character in UTF-8.  You can enter it in Emacs with
> C-q 2 0 0 RET I think.

So, I was getting nowhere just looking at the LaTeX error message so I
found the problem line in the LaTeX source that is causing the problem.
This is what it looks like:

included in teachersâ<U+0080><U+0099> evaluations.

The whole string from the a-circumflex to <U+0099> was originally a
single apostrophe. And the weird thing is that it was just an
apostrophe in the output file, but became this string in the file
produced by the python script. I have no idea why, but I now know how
to deal with it, so I don't care anymore. 

Thanks to everyone for the help.
-- 
Stuart Luppescu
Chief Psychometrician (ret.)
UChicago Consortium on School Research
http://consortium.uchicago.edu