Re: tlug: XEmacs and Kanji detection

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

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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>>>>> "Jason" == Jason Molenda <crash@example.com> writes:

    Jason> I've really not wanted to wade in to this discussion
    Jason> because I don't know the first thing about emacs, BUT I
    Jason> think this is all being made a lot harder than it should
    Jason> be.

Depends.  If you just want to display Japanese, or if you're satisfied
with SKK/Quail for input, I'm pretty sure you're right (now that I've
gone around the block a few times.  None of it's documented as far as
I could find, though); nothing in Info, the Mule docs in etc are
ancient, and so on).  If you want external henkan servers, and
especially if XIM-based, it's harder.

    Jason> I built XEmacs 20.2 with these options:

    Jason> configure --with-gnu-make --with-jpeg --with-png
    Jason> --with-sound=native --with-xpm --with-xface --with-mule
    Jason> --prefix=/usr/local/net

Oops, I missed the --with-<images>.  Thanks.

    Jason> I configured it to default to Japanese by clicking on
    Jason> Options...Language Environment...Japanese and then
    Jason> Options...Save Options.  Now when I start up XEmacs, it
    Jason> says "EUC/Ja" in the lower left hand corner of the window.

First, I think that this should probably work for anybody with
compiled-in Canna or Wnn, but I can't check it out at the moment.

But, unfortunately, with XIM you don't get that far if you haven't set
the LANG or LC_ALL variables (I guess you could if you already knew it
was there, but most Emacs people are keyboard-oriented and the XIM
version of XEmacs core dumps on any keyboard input if there's no
henkan server.  Gotcha!  Got me, anyway :-)

And you get the core dump (in --with-xim configurations) in any case
when you touch the keyboard....  Saving options doesn't fix that
because the options get set when .emacs is loaded, _after_ the attempt
to open an input method.

    Jason> I just started up w3 (Apps...Browse The Web) and brought up
    Jason> http://www.cygnus.co.jp which is a content-type
    Jason> iso-2022-jp.

Did you try ETL (http://www.etl.go.jp/Research/mulepage/MuleJapanese.html),
or did you just try the local page?  I suspect that the Cygnus page is
ISO-2022-JP, but that it does _not_ advertise the fact with a MIME
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-2022-jp header.  I can't check
that since Cygnus is completely offline at the moment.

I don't know for sure that this is the problem, but I have checked it
by trying both a file that works (without a charset in the
Content-Type header) and a broken one (with charset in the
Content-Type header), and then sed'ing charset options in and out of
the prefixed MIME headers with the result that brokenness got swapped.

    Jason> I like SKK, and it doesn't look like SKK likes XEmacs 20.2,
    Jason> so I'm still keeping my mule binary around for when I write
    Jason> Japanese.  But SKK users are in the minority, so I'm not
    Jason> surprised that it didn't work straightaway.

What do you mean by "SKK doesn't like XEmacs?"  Have you tried Quail?
It evolved out of SKK and as far as I can remember uses the same
interface.  I don't use it, so I can't help with configuration.  But
it should be pretty trivial.

    Jason> I don't have any LANG or LANGUAGE or anything set.

This one I was partly confused on.  Mule does have internal support
for swapping language environments (although not locales), and you can
access it conveniently enough through the Options/Languages menu.
However, I would like a solution for that that allows multiple
external henkan servers.  There doesn't seem to be another interface
for handling XIM, and as far as I know even --with-wnn doesn't permit
both Japanese and Korean (kWnn) to be used with the same Emacs
process.  (No, I'm not multilingual in Japanese and Korean, but a lot
of my students are.)

    >> Re: w3.el.  I'm _not_ getting Japanese on the Mule homepage
    >> (the top page is OK, since all the Japanese is in GIFs, but
    >> http://www.etl.go.jp/Research/mulepage/MuleJapanese.html
    >> bombs).  I

    Jason> It doesn't bomb for me, but I only get mojibake.

Sorry, that's what I meant.

    Jason> I don't use w3.el (don't like emacs :-), so I don't know
    Jason> how useful it is in general.

It's not Netscape, but it does have a complete emulation of Lynx :-)

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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