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.