Re: Usage of standard-display-table in MSDOS

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2010 02:33:53 +0300
> From: "Ehud Karni" <ehud@unix.mvs.co.il>
> Cc: handa@m17n.org, eliz@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Reply-to: ehud@unix.mvs.co.il
> 
> Problem 1:
> On text terminal the language environment has great influence on the
> use of the display table - characters not it the language - are
> always displayed as ? . So in the "C" locale, all characters > 127
> are displayed as ?.
> In the "he_IL" locale (= ISO-8859-8) characters in the range
> 191-223 and 251-255 are displayed as ?.
> In the "en_GB" locale (= ISO-8859-1) the Hebrew characters (#x5D0-
> #x5EA) are displayed as ?.

The locale affects the value of terminal-coding-system.  Other than
that, it shouldn't affect the issues that are important to you in the
context of what we discuss here.

You can control the value of terminal-coding-system with "C-x RET t",
if what set-locale-environment does is not good enough.  In
particular, I would try using cp862.

> I really must use the "he_IL" because most of the file my users view
> are in ISO-8859-8 and a small part have MSDOS Hebrew (#x80-#x9A), but
> I want to see all the characters (#xB0-#xDF) literally (i.e. when a
> byte in this range is displayed, its 8 bit value should be sent to
> the terminal.

I thought the latest changes by Handa-san were supposed to do this.
Eight-bit-characters sent to the terminal should always produce the
corresponding 8-bit byte values, no matter which
terminal-coding-system is used.  It sounds like you say that didn't
work?

> Problem 2:
> When I use `find-file-literally' to visit a file, the display table is
> mostly ignored, characters in #xA0-B2 are displayed in \OOO form, while
> #xB3-DF are displayed as empty boxes (on X), whatever locale I use.
> This is a change from the behavior of emacs-21.
> Note: This can be controlled by `set-buffer-multibyte t', but then the
> display is sometimes corrupted.

Sounds like display of unibyte characters doesn't work according to
the display table?