Yes this is the last resort. The only xkb layout I know which provides the ”, is the german layout, whose key distribution I do not know by heart. So I should dig out the relevant binding and put into us-international which I use frequently. The problem is: on my KDE3(trinity) Kubuntu distribution switching the keyboard layout is somehow buggy and leads to frequent freeze, which seems difficult to debug. So I consider this approach as the last resort. I tried something similar without success, your code, at least allows to paste the char into the isearch buffer, but then does not perform any search when pressing C-s again the char gets deleted. :'( So I thought of using iso-accents-mode, since it can be switched on/off in the isearch buffer[1], but alas it seems that while « is included within in latinX ” is not but only part of utf-8, so this seems also not to work Well what-cursor-position tells me: Char: « (U+00AB latin-iso8859-1 43) point=2696 of 2766(97%) column 1 Char: ” (U+201D latin-iso8859-16 53) point=2592 of 2727(95%) column 1 So it is part of 8859-16 (latin 16) but what is its octal representation? Uwe Footnotes: [1] which quail input method cannot as we discussed. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta