Re: Emacs Lisp's future

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > Here's the discussion I had in mind:
 > 
 >   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2013-03/msg00420.html

Oh, that's rich:

    The same can be said for etc/tutorials/TUTORIAL.ja.  This file
    should be shown in a proper Japanese font even for a user not in
    Japanese lang. env.

With all due respect, Dr. Handa, that is quite ironic.  You know as
well as I do what every Japanese textbook does to Chinese poetry.

Technically speaking, this kind of font choice is better done with
metadata.  For example, the user's default fonts might not make a
clear distinction among the different styles, or might be very
unrepresentative of one or more languages' typical style.  The fact
that Emacs *can* do it based on character set is kinda silly nowadays
because *nobody else* does.  The effort would be better spent on
improving CSS support.

And this again is amusing:

CJK variety: GB(元气,开发), BIG5(元氣,開發), JIS(元気,開発), KSC(元氣,開發)

I know[1] that there are consistent font style differences between
each pair of coding systems above, and those are nice to have.  But
what is funny is that *mostly those are not glyph differences in the
same character across languages, those are different characters in
Unicode!*  (Those are not 4 characters represented in 4 different
coding systems: there are at least 8 different characters involved.
And all but 2 of them are in fact representable in that venerable
subset of the Japanese standard, JIS X 0208.)

So, yes, I suppose that there are minor technical issues (I note that
TUTORIAL.ja didn't round-trip -- which is odd, and "CJK variety"
obviously can't).  But the assertions that these files "shouldn't"
converted to UTF-8 because the differences "cannot" be represented in
UTF-8 are primarily artistic, and a point of view with which many
users differ.  (Besides the practice of the Japanese Ministry of
Education, Culture, etc, mentioned above, my Chinese students often
prefer to use Chinese fonts for their Japanese papers because they are
"more readable", for example -- of course, they need to fix that when
they hand them in to Japanese professors, who find the Chinese fonts
"unreadable" -- and so it goes.)


Footnotes: 
[1]  I'm working in a TTY so I can't see them at the moment.