Re: emacs 23.1 font problem

[Gerhard <feldspat@gmx.net>]

David Kastrup wrote:

> Gerhard <feldspat@gmx.net> writes:
> 
>>>> In GNU Emacs 23.1.90.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.18.3)
>>>>  of 2010-01-08 on localhost
>>>> Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version
>>>> 11.0.10605000 Important settings:
>>>>   value of $LC_ALL: nil
>>>>   value of $LC_COLLATE: de_DE.UTF-8
>>>>   value of $LC_CTYPE: de_DE.UTF-8
>>>>   value of $LC_MESSAGES: de_DE.UTF-8
>>>>   value of $LC_MONETARY: fr_FR.UTF-8
>>>>   value of $LC_NUMERIC: fr_FR.UTF-8
>>>>   value of $LC_TIME: de_DE.UTF-8
>>>>   value of $LANG: de_DE.UTF-8
>>>>   value of $XMODIFIERS: @im=none
>>>>   locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix
>>>>   default enable-multibyte-characters: t
>>> 
>>> What happens when you start Emacs with
>>> 
>>> LC_NUMERIC=C emacs
>>> 
>>> ?
>> Everything seems to work fine now, great!
>>
>> Am I right in supposing that this resets locales only for emacs, and
>> that there should be no undesired side-effects elsewhere?
> 
> It will affect every program started from within Emacs as well.  I am
> not clear what code is responsible for this: the problem is likely
> because either scanf or printf or its equivalents use "," instead of "."
> in numbers.
> 
> Whether this happens inside of Emacs proper or in GTK, I don't know.  In
> general, you rarely want LC_NUMERIC to be different from "C" for
> _anything_.  Programming languages and libraries and utilities break
> because programmers hardly ever expect that the equivalent of
> printf("%4.2f",3.0) would result in "3,00" in foreign locales.
> 
> I know that some versions of Ghostscript ceased being able to parse
> numbers in PostScript programs in such locales.
> 
> So while the above invocation is just for Emacs and subprocesses, your
> setting of LC_NUMERIC is likely going to cause trouble occasionally also
> elsewhere.  

Thank you for these detailed explanations. I will set my LC_NUMERIC to C.

> And why you would want French monetary expressions in a
> German locale also escapes me.

This is what my distro gave me, since I told it when installing that I lived 
in France, but still wanted to have a German language environment. These 
days, it doesn't seem to matter all that much whether your monetary 
expressions are French or German, anyways ...