Re: TUTORIAL.de updated

[Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>]

>> Well, a typical US user doesn't need to know how to enter foreign
>> languages, does she?
> 
> Probably not, but then why does a German user need a lesson on how
> to type German on her keyboard?

It is not too uncommon that German users have a US keyboard because
they are programming a lot.  The characters [ ] { } are really awkward
to type on a German keyboard.

> Is a situation where a native German speaker learns to use Emacs on
> a machine that doesn't already support German input on the OS level
> anything but very rare?

Well, on my GNU/Linux box, the Quail input methods for German offered
by Emacs are better than SCIM.  One main reason is that the latter
disables the use of a `.XCompose' file, which is very bad for me.  I
don't know whether the successor of SCIM (I forgot its name) has fixed
this.

Regardless of the keyboard and input method issues, there are still
three dominant encodings used in Germany and Austria, namely latin-1,
windows-1252, and utf-8, and I consider it important that a user knows
how to force an encoding in case Emacs fails to recognize it properly.

As I said, the MULE section can be certainly improved :-)


    Werner