Date inserted by Emacs org-mode is not readable

Question

I am using org-mode within Emacs.

The problem is after issuing C-c > or C-c . org-mode insert date like below,

(firstly it appears within the minibuffer, even the editing file is encoded with utf-8)

<2012-12-09 \326\334\310\325>

How to resolve this issue? My OS is Win7 32bit Chinese version.

Answer 1

Basically, I think the fonts emacs is using are not able to display the way the day is spelled in your language. I'd guess you lack some installed fonts, or emacs doesn't know where to find them, but I'm not sure how to fix this.

That being said, inserting such octal escapes into my emacs gives me ÖÜÈÕ, which I don't believe to be how days spell in many languages. The file might be encoded in utf-8, but what about the buffer ? What's the buffer-file-coding-system variable in that buffer (C-h v buffer-file-coding-system) ?

The variables calendar-day-name-array and org-time-stamp-custom-formats might be of interest, and I guess you could override how the timestamps appear right now with org-display-custom-times, that would probably be a workaround. See the manual for more about it.

At last, I have

  (set-language-environment "UTF-8")
  (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

in my config, functions you may want to investigate about.