problem with old hebrew latex files in iso 8859-8 coding

[Uwe Brauer]

Hello 

A friend of mine posses a lot of hebrew latex files which still use
8859-8 coding. Understandable he wants to switch to UTF8 and xelatex.

The problem is that while his files are displayed perfectly in texstudio
(having iso 8859-8 enabled), which means the system has the requires
fonts installed, emacs fails to do so. It simply does not display the
hebrew chars with the correct fonts.

What also works is to run 

iconv -f ISO8859-8 -t UTF-8 file1.txt file2.txt

The resulting file file2.txt is displayed perfectly in GNU emacs.



What does work is to open the file in GNU emacs, save it as UTF-8, the
resulting file is still not correctly displayed, I even tried to save
the file as 8859-8 but then I received the following error



,----
| These default coding systems were tried to encode text
| in the buffer ‘doc2.txt’:
|   (hebrew-iso-8bit-unix (1 . 233) (2 . 228) (3 . 233) (7 . 238) (8 .
|   248) (9 . 231) (10 . 225) (12 . 229) (14 . 232) ...)
| However, each of them encountered characters it couldn’t encode:
|   hebrew-iso-8bit-unix cannot encode these: é ä é î ø ç á å è å ...
| 
| Click on a character (or switch to this window by ‘C-x o’
| and select the characters by RET) to jump to the place it appears,
| where ‘C-u C-x =’ will give information about it.
| 
| Select one of the safe coding systems listed below,
| or cancel the writing with C-g and edit the buffer
|    to remove or modify the problematic characters,
| or specify any other coding system (and risk losing
|    the problematic characters).
| 
|   utf-8 iso-8859-1 euc-jis-2004 euc-jp iso-2022-jp-2004 next cp858
|   cp850 windows-1252 iso-8859-15 gb18030 utf-7 utf-16
|   utf-16be-with-signature utf-16le-with-signature utf-16be utf-16le
|   iso-2022-7bit utf-8-auto utf-8-with-signature eucjp-ms utf-8-hfs
|   japanese-shift-jis-2004 japanese-iso-7bit-1978-irv ibm1047
|   utf-7-imap utf-8-emacs prefer-utf-8
`----

I attach the file, once as a original file, once with the latex commands
removed.

Any help is strongly appreciated.

Regards

Uwe Brauer

document.txt
Description: Text document

junk.tex
Description: Text Data