Re: [tlug] What's with emacs and utf-8?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Stuart" == Stuart Luppescu <s-luppescu@example.com> writes:

    Stuart> Hi all, I was trying to redo my little .sig template (with
    Stuart> the family information is Japanese) to save it as utf-8
    Stuart> (because that's the encoding gmail uses), but when I tried
    Stuart> to save it as utf-8 (C-x <RETURN> f utf-8-unix C-x C-s) it
    Stuart> told me:

Heh heh heh.  That's what you get for using rmsmacs.  This is trivial
(though not quite automated) in XEmacs.

    Stuart> Hasn't emacs made it into the modern world?

No.  The only reason GNU Emacs has multilingual capabilities at all is
XEmacs envy AFAICS; rms refused to put NEmacs, then Mule, into Emacs
for 10 years---he correctly insisted on a multilingual subsystem based
on Unicode---then simply capitulated to the Mule Lab as soon as XEmacs
released a stable version with Mule.

Problem is, Mule is designed around ISO 2022, and there simply isn't
space in the encoding used to hold all of Unicode.  So what has been
done in GNU Emacs is to make Mule character sets to hold the
alphabetic blocks (up to about 0x3fff, IIRC), and symbols and specials
in 0xE800--0xFFFF.  Tough luck if you use Han characters or Hangul.

You can try to find Mule-UCS and install it, which gives full coverage
of Unicode (although the internal code is still Mule code) or you can
get Emacs from CVS (I _think_ it has Asian support), or if that fails,
you can get the emacs-unicode branch from CVS.

Or, if you'd rather switch than fight, install XEmacs 21.4.15 (.16 is
due out RSN) and the regular and Mule packages, and put

(require 'un-define)
(set-coding-priority-list '(utf-8))
(set-coding-category-system 'utf-8 utf-8)

in your init file (~/.emacs, but XEmacs prefers to put it in
~/.xemacs/init.el, and will offer to migrate it for you).  This also
uses Mule-UCS, but in XEmacs it's a (semi-)supported package, rather
than a third-party system.  You could also build and install XEmacs
21.5 which has native Unicode support (although it still uses Mule
code inside), but that's hardly an advantage over building your own
GNU Emacs.

Now, XEmacs was on track to have Unicode as the internal encoding in
2002, but of course as soon as rms signed up with the Mule Lab, the
Mule Lab stopped funding development in XEmacs....  Maybe in early 2005.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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