Re: Processing Chinese Big5 in Emacs Info reader

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@elta.co.il>]

> From: Chun-Chieh Huang <jjhuang@cm.nctu.edu.tw>
> Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2004 13:23:51 +0800
> 
> I only changed one line in info.el to support Big5 Info reading in
> Emacs, as below: (info.el from CVS)
> 
> [jjhuang@albert-laptop lisp]$ diff info.el.~1.376.~ info.el
> 343c343,344
> <               (coding-system-for-write 'no-conversion)
> ---
> > ;;            (coding-system-for-write 'no-conversion)
> >               (coding-system-for-write 'buffer-file-coding-system)

Thanks.

However, I wonder why did this work for you at all, and why the
original code didn't.

Are your Info files kept compressed on the disk, and if so, in what
format?  The part of code that you changed is only run for compressed
Info files and doesn't change a bit the case of uncompressed Info
files.

On the other hand, coding-system-for-write is set to no-conversion
because it is used to write the compressed file to a temporary file
that is submitted to a decoder program, such as unzip or bunzip2;
clearly, writing compressed text with any other value for
coding-system-for-write is looking for trouble.  Binding
coding-system-for-read, which is used to read back the results of
decompression, is more appropriate, but Emacs should already set that
correctly by itself, at least in the locale where Big5 is the
preferred encoding.

So I'm confused how could this change solve your problem, and even
what is the problem (i.e. what happens if you use the original
info.el).  Could you please elaborate to show me what I'm missing?