Paste international characters with Emacs 21.3 on Windows

Paste international characters with Emacs 21.3 on Windows

[Gareth Rees]

I'm using GNU Emacs 21.3.1 [(i386-mingw-nt5.0.2195) of 2004-03-10 on
NYAUMO] on Windows 2000.  Using the LEIM I can enter Japanese text. 
But
I can't paste Japanese text from other Windows applications.  The NEWS
file suggests setting selection-coding-system to utf-16-le-dos, but
that
doesn't work.

Any suggestions?

I found a previous thread on this subject [1] in comp.emacs but it
wasn't very helpful.  Maybe this is a bug?

[1] http://groups.google.com/groups?th=cfffaa9a6b323af6&seekm=c0i915%245m%241%40aspen.sucs.soton.ac.uk

-- 
Gareth Rees

Re: Paste international characters with Emacs 21.3 on Windows

[Jason Rumney]

gareth.rees@pobox.com (Gareth Rees) writes:

> I'm using GNU Emacs 21.3.1 [(i386-mingw-nt5.0.2195) of 2004-03-10 on
> NYAUMO] on Windows 2000.  Using the LEIM I can enter Japanese text.
> But I can't paste Japanese text from other Windows applications.
> The NEWS file suggests setting selection-coding-system to
> utf-16-le-dos, but that doesn't work.

The NEWS file is wrong. You might have more luck setting
selection-coding-system to shift-jis-dos, but it will probably only
work if your system locale is Japanese.

Re: Paste international characters with Emacs 21.3 on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: jasonr (Jason Rumney) @  f2s.com
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: Sat, 08 May 2004 20:13:35 +0100
> 
> > I'm using GNU Emacs 21.3.1 [(i386-mingw-nt5.0.2195) of 2004-03-10 on
> > NYAUMO] on Windows 2000.  Using the LEIM I can enter Japanese text.
> > But I can't paste Japanese text from other Windows applications.
> > The NEWS file suggests setting selection-coding-system to
> > utf-16-le-dos, but that doesn't work.
> 
> The NEWS file is wrong.

First, it's not in NEWS, it's in PROBLEMS.  Second, the entry's name
is "Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.2", so it
might be out of date for v21.3.

Having said that, here's what that entry has to say about this issue:

    Windows uses UTF-16 encoding to deal with multilingual text (text not
    encodable in the `system codepage') in the clipboard.  To deal with
    this, load the library `utf-16' and use `set-selection-coding-system'
    to set the clipboard coding system to `utf-16-le-dos'.  This won't
    cope with Far Eastern (`CJK') text; if necessary, install the Mule-UCS
    package (see etc/MORE.STUFF), whose `utf-16-le-dos' coding system does
    encode a lot of CJK characters.

If this is plain wrong (i.e., will never help, no matter what the
circumstances and versions of Windows are involved), somebody should
remove this text from PROBLEMS.

Re: Paste international characters with Emacs 21.3 on Windows

[Gareth Rees]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> First, it's not in NEWS, it's in PROBLEMS. 

It's in NEWS, the second item under "Changes in Emacs 21.3", which says:

    ** UTF-16 coding systems are available, encoding the same characters
    as mule-utf-8.  Coding system `utf-16-le-dos' is useful as the value
    of `selection-coding-system' in MS Windows, allowing you to paste
    multilingual text from the clipboard.  Set it interactively with C-x
    RET x or in .emacs with `(set-selection-coding-system 'utf-16-le-dos)'.

It certainly should be removed if it is wrong.

-- 
Gareth Rees

Re: Paste international characters with Emacs 21.3 on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: gareth.rees@pobox.com (Gareth Rees)
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: 10 May 2004 06:37:29 -0700
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > First, it's not in NEWS, it's in PROBLEMS. 
> 
> It's in NEWS, the second item under "Changes in Emacs 21.3", which says:

Sorry, I was looking at a newer version of NEWS, and got mistaken
because PROBLEMS also says something similar.

> It certainly should be removed if it is wrong.

Jason already did that.