Re: [tlug] GNU EMacs & Japanese files

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

>>>>> "ijw" == ijw  <ijw@example.com> writes:

    ijw> Seriously, I really struggle with this - partly, I think,
    ijw> because I'm on a Windows system at work and specialised
    ijw> builds of (x)emacs are a bit hard to come by.

XEmacs 21.4 on Windows can be built with Mule, but it's not supported
and has lots of problems.  It's easy to build 21.5 in Cygwin, though.
I think Cygwin is actually distributing a 21.5 build now.  AFAIK VC++
builds 21.5 fine, too.  But ... I haven't booted Windows since my
GTAP-using student presented his thesis on Feb 2, and I haven't used
XEmacs on Windows since October or so.

As for advice ... what encoding are you using most often for your
files?  As far as I can tell, EUC-JP and Shift JIS are detected fine,
ISO-2022-JP is actually a fully multilingual encoding and _never_
fails (unless the file is corrupt).  I don't have problems with UTF-8
(as long as I have XEmacs defaulted to the Japanese language
environment).  Nor do I see any difference between Linux, NetBSD, and
Mac OS X environments in this regard.  So I don't know where to start;
I don't have a theory for why you might have problems without more
information.

You could also send me sample files (or URLs off the web) offlist.

Note that doing M-x set-language-environment RET Japanese RET in an
already corrupt buffer will _not_ fix anything; you need to terminate
the buffer with extreme prejudice, set the language environment, and
then reread from disk.  (If you know what you're doing and are lucky,
you may be able to emulate this by handwriting Lisp code, and not
actually reading the file off disk.  But it's faster to kill the
buffer and reread.)

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.