PPS: I have realized that the special characters u-umlaut etc are encoded in a
file with two bytes, i.e. a file with four special characters and a newline is
9 bytes long. I think this indiates that files are saved not with the latin1
encoding but maybe with unicode or something, I don't know. I guess, a2ps and
also the mail reader interpret the characters with latin1 instead of unicode
(or something). Could this explain why I get the strange characters. I don't
know yet how to change the file encoding under xemacs in order to test this
hypothesis.
Best regards, Laurenz.