Re: Paste international characters with Emacs 21.3 on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: jasonr (Jason Rumney) @  f2s.com
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: Sat, 08 May 2004 20:13:35 +0100
> 
> > I'm using GNU Emacs 21.3.1 [(i386-mingw-nt5.0.2195) of 2004-03-10 on
> > NYAUMO] on Windows 2000.  Using the LEIM I can enter Japanese text.
> > But I can't paste Japanese text from other Windows applications.
> > The NEWS file suggests setting selection-coding-system to
> > utf-16-le-dos, but that doesn't work.
> 
> The NEWS file is wrong.

First, it's not in NEWS, it's in PROBLEMS.  Second, the entry's name
is "Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.2", so it
might be out of date for v21.3.

Having said that, here's what that entry has to say about this issue:

    Windows uses UTF-16 encoding to deal with multilingual text (text not
    encodable in the `system codepage') in the clipboard.  To deal with
    this, load the library `utf-16' and use `set-selection-coding-system'
    to set the clipboard coding system to `utf-16-le-dos'.  This won't
    cope with Far Eastern (`CJK') text; if necessary, install the Mule-UCS
    package (see etc/MORE.STUFF), whose `utf-16-le-dos' coding system does
    encode a lot of CJK characters.

If this is plain wrong (i.e., will never help, no matter what the
circumstances and versions of Windows are involved), somebody should
remove this text from PROBLEMS.