Re: BIG5-HKSCS?

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org> writes:

> In article <iluislo9a7g.fsf@latte.josefsson.org>, Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>> Good enough for me.  Do you have an opinion on whether falling back to
>> BIG5 when BIG5-HKSCS is not available [in Gnus, for displaying
>> incoming e-mail in BIG-5HKSCS], is a reasonable behaviour?
>
>> I browsed the BIG5-HKSCS specification, and it appear to add lots of
>> characters (~1500) but it didn't seem to alter any
>
> Hmmm, if that is true, it's possbile to support it in the
> current Emacs.  Emacs repsents Big5 characters in two
> charsets chinese-big5-1 and chinese-big5-2 internally.  The
> former contains Big5 chars #xA140 .. #xC8FE, the latter
> #xC940..#xFEFE.  That means that chinese-big5-1 still has a
> room for that additional 1500 character.
>
>> , and I can't tell
>> whether the additions are critical or just rarely used symbols.  I
>> doubt rendering it as BIG5 is worse than QP, though, which is the
>> current behaviour.
>
> If BIG5-HKSCS surely just adds characters to BIG5, I think
> it is reasonable to fallback to BIG5.  But, as I wrote
> above, it seems possible to support the whole BIG5-HKSCS in
> the current Emacs with a faily small effort.   Could you
> please wait for a while?

I don't read Chinese, so I don't care much, but someone in
gnu.emacs.gnus might be happy. :-) I recall that the characters it
added was in the User-Defined and Vendor-Defined areas of BIG-5, so
making those mean BIG5-HKSCS could potentially conflict with other
BIG5 variants, though.

But all this is beyond my non-ASCII knowledge, so don't count on me to
test or provide any useful feedback.  I'll propose to add the
BIG5-HKSCS -> BIG5 alias to Gnus, though, for old Emacs.

Thanks for your work and prompt responses!