Re: [AUCTeX] Special characters in LaTeX and some Emacs commands don't work!

[Joost Kremers]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 10:20:01PM +0100, Ralf Angeli wrote:
> * gerald jean (2008-12-18) writes:
> 
> > I am using AucTeX 11.85 from Emacs 22.2.1 under Windows XP.
> 
> > But after a while, for reasons unknown to me, none of this works anymore,
> > "end-of-buffer" will echo in the mini-buffer: M-À is undefined, none of the
> > special characters -- and one uses a lot of them when typesetting LaTeX
> > documents -- work anymore.
> 
> `M->' or `M-<', I don't remember which one, switches the keyboard layout
> in Windows.  (This is a functionality of Windows, not one of Emacs.)
> Perhaps this is what's happening.  In the task bar there might be a
> small indicator showing something like "EN" or "FR" which could help you
> figure out which layout is active at a given moment.
> 
> > The only cure I found so far is to kill
> > Emacs and restart it.
> 
> that would contradict the theory of keyboard layout switching.

Actually, it would not! In Windows, keyboard layout settings are (or at
least can be) specific to a program. So you may have an English setting for
one program and a French setting for another. There is a default setting,
which is used for new programs, so that killing and restarting Emacs would
indeed restore the original setting.

To the OP: you should certainly check out the Windows keyboard layout
settings. The key combo that switches settings can be set by the user.
There are a bunch of possible options here, such as shift-alt (which IIUC
is the default one) or shift-ctrl, which are needed in Emacs to access
certain shortcuts, e.g., M-% or M-$. Using any of those functions will
switch the layout.

The keyboard layout settings should also have the option to put an icon in
the task bar, like Ralf said, so you can see which setting is active.

You may also disable all keyboard layouts except the French one, in which
case switching would not be possible.

HTH

-- 
Joost Kremers, PhD
University of Frankfurt
Institute for Cognitive Linguistics
Grüneburgplatz 1
60629 Frankfurt am Main, Germany