Re: Copying and pasting Cyrillic text between Emacs and other apps

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

> From: paulgor@compuserve.com (Paul Gorodyansky)
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: 27 Jan 2004 15:16:48 -0800
> > 
> > I am using NT Emacs 21.3.1 on Windows XP. When I try to copy Cyrillic
> > text from some other application into an Emacs buffer, I get only
> > question marks.
> 
> Looks like Emacs is a NON-Unicode program...

What exactly is ``a Unicode program'' on Windows?  What is missing in
Emacs to DTRT with Cyrillic text in the clipboard on a Windows box
whose system codepage is not cp1251?

I'm asking because Emacs, at least the CVS version, does support
various Unicode-related encodings of text.  I tried them all in the
attempt to paste into Emacs Cyrillic text copied from another Windows
application, and I still get question marks.

My impression is that decoding of clipboard text is not the problem.
Rather, I'm guessing that Emacs fetches the clipboard text in a way
that forces Windows to try to translate it to the current system
codepage, and that this translation attempt replaces all Cyrillic
characters with question marks.  The Windows XP clipboard viewer, for
example, does show the Cyrillic text from the clipboard correctly.  So
it sounds like there is a way to fetch the text from the clipboard,
it's just that Emacs somehow doesn't do it right.

> Please see work-around explained in the Chapter 2 "Copy/Paste"
> of the "Unicode related issues" section on my site.

Alas, none of the solutions there is free software.  UniPad, in
particular, wants you to register if you want a version that isn't
limited to 1000-character documents.  So your work-arounds are not
very practical, unfortunately.

Btw, does anyone know of a tool that can show what's in the clipboard
together with how the text is encoded there?  I found several
clipboard-related utilities, but none of them seems to do what I want,
which is to show me the codepoints of each character in the clipboard.