Article 978973 of rec.arts.sf.fandom:
From: Dan Hoey <haoyuep@aol.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom
Subject: Re: This newsgroup was touted in a Denvention newsletter
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:09:22 -0400
Organization: Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC

Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> Dan Hoey <haoyuep@aol.com> wrote:
>> Emacs can also handle the replacement of UTF-8 characters, but AKICIF
>> knows why you can't search and destroy the "\324"s.  You can, however,
>> replace "\324-" with "-", etc.

> You certainly can search and destroy a \324 character (a lowercase a
> with a hat over it) or anything else in Emacs.  What makes you think
> otherwise?

Like I said, your mileage will almost certainly vary.  In Emacs running
in a shell window in a MacOSX Terminal.app session, the '\324's are
different from the 'a circumflex'es, and you can't query-replace the
former.  Like I said, AKICIF knows why, but I haven't heard back.  This
is probably the penalty for gafiation.

It would probably be better to use "mimencode -u" rather than "cat -v"
anyway.  I didn't, because MacOSX doesn't provide the latter (just as it
doesn't provide pdftotext), but I may be driven to get it.

This is probably a good opportunity for me to correct a statement I made
upthread, that it was "unfortunate" that Denvention's PDFs use Unicode
for their spaces, hyphens, and quotes.  On further thought, I guess it's
just unfortunate that pdftotext deletes them instead of turning them
into ASCII equivalents.  That is a large part of what makes the output
so surreal when you don't use the "-layout" and "-enc UTF-8" switches,
with all the solecisms like "ad vertising" and "twoway" and "this years
Hugo" that make it look careless and unedited.

If you really want to read PDFs, you might try "pdftotext -layout" on
File 770 or the bus schedules and see if the columns come out right,
so you can read them in Emacs.  If you'd rather just admire the
surreality and kvetch about the difficulty of PDFs, you'll have to count
me out.  I'm working on the antithetical problem of dealing with them
more clearly and easily in a text-only environment.  Not that I confine
myself to a text-only environment, I just find it more comfortable for
textual work.

Dan