Re: Cyrillic vs UTF-8

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>
>> Another problem was that Emacs,
>> when asked to load the file as UTF-8, picked a Unicode font that
>> didn't include this glyphs.
>
> I assume that's the general xfree86 4 lossage I mentioned in PROBLEMS.

Yes.

> I can't remember how the font will get chosen by default, but
> there's code in cyrillic.el that should allow mule-unicode-0100-24ff
> characters to be displayed with an 8859-5 or KOI font.  You can also
> change into which Emacs characters utf-8 decodes.

The remaining problem is that this should happen automatically,
without user configuration.

>> To workaround the problem, users need to
>> define a fontset, and use it.
>
> Yes (or purge the unhelpful fonts).

Purging incomplete fonts is not a realistic option, like (I think it
was) Stephen said, it does not make sense for a font designer for,
e.g., cyrillic to include non-cyrillic fonts just because he (rightly)
decided to use the iso-10646 encoding.

>> My other Cyrillic thread was that (double-width) cyrillic
>
> I assume that means the Cyrillic parts of the CJK charsets.

Yes.

>> isn't possible to save as UTF-8 at all.
>
> It's possible if you amend the tables defined in ucs-tables.el or
> utf-8.el -- wherever it is now.  I can't remember whether there are
> potential problems with that, but I at least thought it wasn't
> worthwhile.  If you want to experiment, Mule-UCS has tables with the
> non-CJK characters labelled for JISX &c.

I don't normally use cyrillic, so I don't care much.

But I do believe that when a user like me (who don't normally use
cyrillic) happen to cut'n'paste a cyrillic string from another
application, it should Simply Work without requiring the user to
become familiar with cyrillic usage in emacs.

> [This has got strange recipients because the original mail had
> `Mail-Copies-To: nobody'.  As far as I know, that's a non-standard
> header for news only, so perhaps there's a Gnus bug there.]

The recipient list looked fine; I read the replies to my messages on
the list, no need to CC me.  But it is a non-standard header, so I
don't expect everyone to support it.