Re: Problems in Displaying endash in Emacs-w3m

[Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@Web.DE>]

Am 07.10.2006 um 21:26 schrieb Dieter Wilhelm:

> Thank you for the pointer.  Maybe this is related to the complaint of
> Charles.  W3m displays on this site the hyphen (Bindestrich in German,
> which AFAIU is inserted with the hyphen (-) on the keyboard) longer
> then the dash (Gedankenstrich in German, used also when omitting text)
> but it should be the other way around (As e.g. Firefox does
> correctly).

It's not Firefox: it's the font used. Any programme can only use what  
it gets served. If the font is badly designed, you won't these  
subtleties right. (BTW, our German Gedankenstrich is the endash, in  
the U.S.A. it's the emdash; and while we put spaces around it the  
Americans save these.) If you can change the font Firefox to be the  
same as in GNU Emacs it will make the same mistake – but usually  
Firefox will follow the design of the Web page, so would need to make  
your decision override the designer's one, too. Or simply do the  
change in GNU Emacs ... just for this!

I copied the three dashes off the box I was displaying in Camino, a  
more Mac OS X/Aqua/Cocoa version than Firebox (both have problems to  
display text correctly, at least in Mac OS X). With OmniWeb I was  
able to look into the source of the WikiPedia article: they are using  
the right characters at the right spots (and what you see on screen  
or on paper is a glyph: the shape and face of a character from a  
particular font). So we really might have to wait for a detailed  
answer from Charles where exactly he encountered the problem.

>
> Would you please tell us how you input these characters?  I only know
> of this iso-accents-mode for iso-latin-1 for inserting some non-ascii
> characters, but the mode is supposed to be obsolete because of some
> input methods I don't have any clue.

The different dashes have all their Unicode slots:

[c]  Uni   octal  name
------------------------------
[-]  002D  000055 HYPHEN-MINUS
[‒]  2012  020022 FIGURE DASH
[–]  2013  020023 EN DASH
[—]  2014  020024 EM DASH
[﹘]  FE58  177130 SMALL EM DASH

When you (set read-quoted-char-radix 16), which is usually 8, you can  
directly input C-q 2 0 1 2 RET.

The iso-whatsoever modes are completely inadequate in Unicode  
display, but you probably know.

(The FIGURE DASH is meant to be as wide as a digit and to be used for  
example in telephone numbers: Hawaii 5—O, so that these can stay  
printed in long uniform columns.)


I've found that I can install w3m with Fink on my Mac. This has  
happened by now, and now I'll have to learn a bit about browsing the  
Internet inside GNU Emacs! Crazy.


--
Greetings

   Pete

If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.