Re: TUTORIAL.de updated

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 06:00:22 +0100 (CET)
> Cc: parozusa@web.de, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>
> 
> 
> >> Well, a typical US user doesn't need to know how to enter foreign
> >> languages, does she?
> > 
> > Probably not, but then why does a German user need a lesson on how
> > to type German on her keyboard?
> 
> It is not too uncommon that German users have a US keyboard because
> they are programming a lot.  The characters [ ] { } are really awkward
> to type on a German keyboard.

Those awkward characters don't appear in the tutorial, and we
certainly don't ask the apprentice to type them as part of her working
on the tutorial lessons.

> > Is a situation where a native German speaker learns to use Emacs on
> > a machine that doesn't already support German input on the OS level
> > anything but very rare?
> 
> Well, on my GNU/Linux box, the Quail input methods for German offered
> by Emacs are better than SCIM.  One main reason is that the latter
> disables the use of a `.XCompose' file, which is very bad for me.  I
> don't know whether the successor of SCIM (I forgot its name) has fixed
> this.

Emacs makes many things easier and better.  That doesn't yet mean we
need to put all of them, or even some of them, in the tutorial.

> Regardless of the keyboard and input method issues, there are still
> three dominant encodings used in Germany and Austria, namely latin-1,
> windows-1252, and utf-8, and I consider it important that a user knows
> how to force an encoding in case Emacs fails to recognize it properly.

With the current Emacs, I don't think the user needs that knowledge as
badly as it was needed in v20.x or 21.x.  It might be that this
section was a must 10 or 8 years ago, but I think nowadays it just
gets in the way.

> As I said, the MULE section can be certainly improved :-)

I submit that MULE is not tutorial stuff.

So let's agree to disagree, and let Stefan and Chong make the decision
about this.