Re: Possible change to startup.el

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     > Until multi-language menus are supported, perhaps we should
>     > change the menu item to say
>     >
>     >      Emacs Tutorial (in YOUR-LANGUAGE)
>     >
>     > where YOUR-LANGUAGE stands for the language name.  This should
>     > be done only for those languages that indeed have a translated
>     > tutorial.  The tooltip should also hint about that.
>
>     I think we should do that only for those languages that can't be
>     shown in the menu.  Since this depends on a complex interaction
>     of platform, fonts and locales, I think the programmer wanting
>     to put something into a menu can't be reasonably expected to
>     make a guess.
>
>     So I think that we should add something like
>     (defun menu-string-supported-p STRING &optional DISPLAY)
>     that will tell a programmer whether a given platform is supposed to
>     be able to display a given string.
>
> This might be ok in theory, but I'd rather do something simpler.

It is a reoccuring problem, and it will become more prevalent in
future.

For example, AUCTeX has an option that will enable the use of Unicode
math characters in menus.  How can I know when to enable it by
default?  I need to know for every platform that Emacs might be
running on, and this might even depend on your settings for the menu
font and the locale.

The necessary knowledge when to enable this option and when not is so
complicated to gather that we should provide an interface that
reflects our current wisdom.  The proposed interface has the advantage
that it is easy to use in my opinion (though I'll be glad to hear
something simpler).  Of course it is not simple to implement, but the
reason for that is that the task _is_ not simple, and it makes sense
to solve it once in Emacs instead of anew for every application.

If you have an idea that is also simpler to _use_, I'll be glad to
hear about it.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum