bug#3501: 23.0.94; Use Unicode in Info (?)

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

'Evening, Drew!

On Tue, Jun 09, 2009 at 10:43:01AM -0700, Drew Adams wrote:
> > Please no.  I absolutely do not want to "experience" fancy 
> > unicode characters when reading info.  It's bad enough
> > getting them in email and in usenet postings from Xah Lee. ;-)

> What'll you tell your new Unicode toaster, when your old toaster
> breaks? ;-) Better give up on iPhone and other such new-fangled gadgets
> altogether.

Exactly the same I told the old toaster: they both understand ASCII.

> > ASCII can be displayed perfectly on any screen or teletype or even
> > punched card puncher that can display English at all.  Unicode, by
> > contrast, needs a fancy setup, even if lots of computers already have
> > such a setup.

> Isn't Emacs capable of somehow knowing whether the current display can
> show non-ASCII chars? If not, we'll forever remain with
> horse-and-buggy, I guess.

Emacs is capable of anything, provided you put enough effort into telling
it.  Assuming you're running on a pure ASCII display, or one running an
ISO-8859 character set (as I do), how much effort must you put into
telling Emacs (and standalone Info) that you really, really don't want
random Unicode bytes cluttering up your screen? 

> I'm not against coddling your sturdy old card punch, but not at the
> price of giving up the world beyond ASCII for the rest of, well, the
> world beyond ASCII (does your punch _really_ speak ASCII, or does it
> speak EBCDIC or perhaps Univac field-data chars?).

> Would you by the same token remove the possibility of Emacs files to
> use Unicode chars?

Not at all.  Quite a lot of people want Unicode, but quite a lot don't.
We shouldn't force it upon them.  

> Library buff-menu.el uses utf-8 encoding, for example, and displays a
> U+2014 (em dash char) if available. It tests like this:

> ;; Use U+2014 (EM DASH) to underline if possible,
> ;; else use ASCII (i.e. U+002D, HYPHEN-MINUS).
> (if (char-displayable-p ?\u2014) ?\u2014 ?-)

> Presumably something similar (but preferably more general) can be done
> to ensure that your card punch can swallow J/orgensen if it can't
> digest Jørgensen.

Who's volunteering to do this?

> > Is that bad?  J/orgensen is more readable (IMHO) than JÀ«rgensen (or
> > whatever that letter's two bytes actually are).

> Jørgensen is more readable than J/orgensen, but J/orgensen is fine for
> a card punch. ;-)

Possibly.  But I have just the _tiniest_ suspicion that this is the thin
end of the wedge, the crack in the dyke, the floodgates wanting to burst
open.  How long before people start using Xah's fancy 3-byte quote marks,
with associated dangly bits hanging off them?

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).