> Ctrl-S being turned into a rectangle is mysterious. Is it the > standard way for Emacs to tell about a non-printable character?
There is no Ctrl-S character only a tick mark in the compose-region snippet that I shared. You can see the tick mark if you follow this link: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/52281 The tickmark is produced by M-x ucs-insert RET CHECK MARK RET If the above command doesn't yield a tick mark the issue is with your setup. May be copy-paste from your Emacs client to your Elisp file garbled the characters? --
