Dear Richard,

Nick was absolutely right in pointing out that all postings about using Umlauts in a more direct fashion in the LaTeX source assume that the buffer is encoded in UTF-8 and that "\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}" is included in the LaTeX file (org does this by default).

I have been using a "(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)" line in my .emacs file for some time and it works well for me. All better version control systems should be able to handle UTF-8 correctly (however, I believe that you might lose some functionality when using UTF-16 or other unicode flavours as files with this encoding might be treated as binary).

Warm regards,
 Stefan
-- 
Dr. Stefan Vollmar, Dipl.-Phys.
Head of IT group
Max-Planck-Institut für neurologische Forschung
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