From: Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net>
To: Andreas Schwab <schwab@suse.de>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: What is a preferred charset?
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2018 17:48:37 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87r2fe4bru.fsf@gmx.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <mvmo9aijvx1.fsf@suse.de> (Andreas Schwab's message of "Wed, 21 Nov 2018 16:24:26 +0100")
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 16:24:26 +0100 Andreas Schwab <schwab@suse.de> wrote:
> On Nov 21 2018, Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net> wrote:
>
>> The discussion in bug#33445 made me realize that I don't know what
>> distinguishes a preferred charset from other charsets
>
> It's the first from (charset-priority-list) that can encode the
> character. The priority is defined by the language environment.
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 17:37:07 +0200 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> "Preferred" is used there in the sense of "highest priority". See
> charset-priority-list, set-charset-priority, and char-charset. They
> are described in the node "Character Sets" of the ELisp manual.
>
> I guess someone tried to say "highest-priority" in fewer characters,
> to avoid making the line too long.
I had read that section of the manual before posting and at first did
conclude that preferred meant highest priority, but the output of
describe-char in HELLO seemed to conflict with that:
>> For example, etc/HELLO uses the non-standard text/enriched
>> annotation "x-charset" to make `describe-char' show
>> "latin-iso8859-1" as the preferred charset of INVERTED EXCLAMATION
>> MARK (#xa1), whereas when I use `C-x 8' to enter that character in a
>> buffer `describe-char' says its preferred charset is "unicode". Why
>> are there different preferred charsets in these cases and what's the
>> significance and use of that difference in general
>
> When text has the 'charset' property, we show its value as the
> highest-priority charset of the characters having that property. This
> property is described in "Explicit Encoding".
On my system (where the value of locale-coding-system is utf-8-unix) the
first entries in charset-priority-list are: ascii iso-8859-1 unicode
latin-iso8859-1 ... And calling char-charset on the character named
INVERTED EXCLAMATION MARK returns "unicode" here. That accords with
what you both wrote above about highest priority, but...
> In the case of HELLO, each hello phrase was given the 'charset'
> property corresponding to its language's script, so as to instruct
> Emacs to choose the most appropriate font for that greeting.
...this seems to be a different criterion for preferred, not the highest
priority as defined above, but (maybe) the smallest charset able to
encode the character?
>> and should it be documented?
>
> Now that you know what this is about, you tell me ;-)
I'm still not sure.
Steve Berman
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-11-21 16:48 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-11-21 14:55 What is a preferred charset? Stephen Berman
2018-11-21 15:24 ` Andreas Schwab
2018-11-21 15:40 ` Stefan Monnier
2018-11-21 16:04 ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-11-21 16:48 ` Stephen Berman [this message]
2018-11-21 22:30 ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-11-21 22:44 ` Stephen Berman
2018-11-22 3:39 ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-11-22 9:07 ` Stephen Berman
2018-11-22 15:30 ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-11-22 16:28 ` Stephen Berman
2018-11-21 15:37 ` Eli Zaretskii
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