Re: iso-8859-1 and non-latin-1 chars

[Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk>]

Ken Stevens <kstevens@ichips.intel.com> writes:

> Ispell _does_ support multibyte characters.  This was one of the
> historical reasons ispell.el did not use emacs syntax tables to
> determine word boundaries.  (It supported latex words that included
> escape sequences such as \'{o}, etc.)

I didn't think that's really the same thing, but it's a long time
since I hacked on ispell.  Also, I don't see why Emacs couldn't match
such words the same as ispell.

Anyhow, as I don't know, what does one have to do to create and use a
dictionary for utf-8 text?  I could probably add support for that.

> I am not sure what it would take to support all the internal emacs
> encodings, or if this would be the best approach.

It is only _external_ encodings that are relevant, and perhaps only
utf-8.  [I don't know if spell-checking actually makes sense in the
Oriental languages which typically use the multibyte iso-2022
encodings.]

Note that Emacs could cope now with checking utf-8-encoded text
against a dictionary for an 8-bit character set as long as the text
concerned can be encoded in that set.  The text will be appropriately
encoded when it is sent to the subprocess.  I think that really
requires using Emacs's (multibyte) syntax tables, though.