Jan Vroonhof <vroonhof(a)math.ethz.ch&gt; writes: I believe this is possible, but slightly ugly. My code that creates an ISO 8859-2 char looks approximately like this: (defun latin2-char (code) (if (and (> code 128) (featurep 'mule)) (make-char 'latin-iso8859-2 (- code 128)) (int-char code))) This means that you can take an 8-bit integer code (which is portable across everything) and a charset, and make them into an appropriate Mule character. Yes. The right thing to do this is to port `make-char' to non-Mule XEmacs. Me and Olivier Galibert have hashed it out how it needs to be done, now only someone needs to implement it (it's trivial[1]). [1] Trivial as in real programmers' trivial. The dictionary goes like this: trivial == might take me some time to do, but it's not hard. easy == might take me quite some time to do, but it's not too hard. straightforward == possibly very hard and time-consuming, but the algorithm is known in advance. hard == undoable, except by a real programmer.