Re: w32 mule status

["Edward Casey" <ejmn@cpinternet.com>]

<jasonr (Jason Rumney) @ f2s.com> wrote in message
news:ur7qquggp.fsf@jasonrumney.net...
> "Edward Casey" <ejmn@cpinternet.com> writes:
>
> > The differences are just in the lines beginning with TAB [. These
lines
> > are missing from the fontset on the machine that won't display Latin-4
> > characters.
>
> So that machine does not have those fonts. Since this is Windows 98,
> the default fonts for the US version are Latin-1 only. There is
> another set of default fonts, which used to be available from the MS
> website, and is also installed by various MS software packages. This
> set supports many more encodings. If you do not look closely, it may
> appear that the fonts are the same on both machines, but in the font
> selection dialog, you have a "Script" dropdown selection, which will
> be different on the machines that work compared to the one that
> doesn't.
>

You are right in that the original Win98 installation didn't have them but
I've gotten them either from the web or from other software packages. They
work fine under 98 on one machine and not at all on the other two. The
exact same font files are on all 3 machines. The only thing that two
non-working installations have in common is that they're not connected to
the internet and 1 (the laptop) has no modem. Although MS can justly be
faulted for it's ad hoc software design history, I can't believe, for
instance, that a setting in Outlook Express can have any effect on emacs
font display capabilities.
If I run C-h h on the good machine with font Arial Unicode I see glyphs
for Russian, Korean, four flavors of Chinese, etc. Only a 25% of the lines
have empty rectangles on them. If I change the font in this buffer to
Palatino Linotype I see almost as many foreign glyphs (JIS Chinese is
missing). In fact, on the "bad" machines, with 'list character sets' I can
get most of the glyphs to display except for Latin-3 and Latin-4. ???
Finally, if I evaluate this form on all machines:

(if (eq window-system 'w32)        ; emacs 20 & up
    (defun insert-x-style-font()
      "Insert a string in the X format which describes a font the user can
select from the Windows font selector."
      (interactive)
      (insert (prin1-to-string (w32-select-font)))))

I get exactly the same X format string.


> > I still think that the parameters for the fontsets have to be stored
> > somewhere.
>
> Only if you set them.
>
> > What does M-x describe-fontset read?
>
> It describes the fontset you specify. But this is a red herring. Emacs
> 21 displays all characters regardless of whether you use a font or a
> fontset. The fontset gives you finer control over which fonts are used
> to display which characters.

This is good to know. Even if I knew how to make a fontset with a Latin-4
font specified in it, I probably would't be able to see the glyphs until I
could resolve the other mysterious problem.

>
> > Since I messed up one of the machines I have 2 fontsets called
> > fonset-default with different settings. This leads me to believe that
the
> > (create-fontset-from-fontset-spec) function adds the definitions to a
list
> > somewhere.
>
> If you put that in .emacs, it is saved in .emacs. There is nothing
> magic going on behind the scenes.

That at least is a relief. After exiting and restarting emacs I no longer
had 2 fontsets called default, only 1 together with 'standard: 13dot.'

Thanks again for your help, Mr. Rumney. Since MS Windows is probably
off-topic here, I'll keep plugging away at solving the problem and
learning emacs and I won't bother you for a while, at least not until I
lose patience again.