Re: Mail and Mule

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Dennis" == Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com> writes:

    Dennis> On Sun, 2 Jun 1996, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: "I'm not
    Dennis> really interested in using Pine since I'm not willing to
    Dennis> give up mule as my editor..."

    Dennis>   Surely you don't have to give up mule, do you?  I use vi
    Dennis> from Pine, but you could just as easily use Emacs or
    Dennis> presumably mule.

Well, it's not just the editing functions, it's Supercite (which only
works if the original mail is in an Emacs buffer, since it's a .el
file), multiple reading buffers, the ability to pull in quotes from
several messages, and the ability to parse the headers to determine
which file I want to put various mail into, that I don't want to live
without.  Pine's menu-based approach drives me up a wall, too.  Oh,
yeah, I like to do funny things with my mail headers on occasion, that 
Pine's "rich headers" format doesn't permit AFAIK.

    Dennis>   Speaking of mule, can anyone point me towards the
    Dennis> information I need to set up Mule on my machine for
    Dennis> Chinese and Japanese input with the Wnn front end?  I read
    Dennis> Japanese quite well, and have looked and looked for the
    Dennis> info I need, but I've yet to find it.

The simple way to do this is to install the JE distribution (Japanese
extensions).  These are available on all Sunsite mirrors, under the
distributions directory.  There is an ez-install program which I never 
got to work right when I first tried it a couple years ago; since then 
I've simply used "tar xvzf" in the appropriate directory.  The only
thing you need to be careful about is that there are three common FEPs 
(Wnn, Canna, and SKK) for NEmacs/Mule, and you need to get the right
Mule since support is compiled into Mule.

I don't know exactly the details of this, though, since I now build my 
own Mule and Canna.  (The old JE made some annoying assumptions about
directory structure that violated the FSSTND.)

I'm not sure about getting Chinese as well, I think you get it for
free but I'm not sure.  I have always used Canna (no particular
reason) which does allow this (I think, I don't use Chinese).  Wnn on
the other hand may require separate server processes (jserver and
cserver) for the two languages.

    Dennis>   If there is really a need for a proper FAQ on this, I
    Dennis> would consider writing one.  Any ideas or recommendations
    Dennis> (particularly on the merits of the various FEPs) would be
    Dennis> most welcome.

Canna is somewhat lighter weight than current versions of Wnn.  Wnn is
much more full-featured.  Otherwise Wnn and Canna are quite similar at
my level of Japanese usage (Wnn is used on the University's machines;
it's my own machine that only has Canna running).  SKK only works
inside NEmacs/Mule since it's written in Emacs LISP.  I don't know
anything about sj3.

There should be more than you would ever want to know about the
subject in the JF (Japanese FAQ) distribution, also available at your
favorite Sunsite mirror.  Also there is the JLinuxDoc project,
producing Japanese versions of the LinuxDoc project's guides.

    Dennis> Dennis McMurchy, Tojinmachi, Fukuoka