Re: getting Mule, Unicode & X selection to play together

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

On Sun, 15 Dec 2002, Michael Livshin wrote:

> so the day had come and I decided to explore the wonderful world of
> Emacs 21 and Mule, what with all the nice Debian packaging of them out
> there.
> 
> so I installed Emacs 21 and mule-ucs (it seemed like a good idea, or
> was it?)

It's not necessarily a good idea to bring Mule-UCS into this equation.  In 
any case, you will be much better off using the CVS version of Emacs 
where several related bugs were fixed lately.

> now, if I select a chunk of cyrillic text in Mozilla and paste it into
> Emacs, I do indeed get the same-looking text.  however, the char codes
> are different from whatever Emacs itself chooses for the same entities
> if I type them into it (which is just weird, but no biggie), and (as a
> consequence, probably) the pasted text is shown in a different font
> (which is butt ugly).

I suspect that Emacs converts the pasted text into Unicode codepoints, 
and that your Unicode font is ugly.  What does "C-u C-x =" tell about the 
cyrillic characters you paste this way?

> so basically I'd like Emacs to somehow recognize the cyrillic
> characters in the X selection it receives, and to convert them into
> the codes it itself uses for the same characters.

The problem is, Emacs 21 uses two different codepoints for Cyrillic 
characters: one based on ISO-8859-5, the other based on Unicode.  
Conversion between them is not supported in stock Emacs distributions, 
AFAIK you need either add-on packages (such as ucs-tables you can find
on gnu.emacs.sources) or the latest development code from CVS.