Re: Emacspeak and UTF-8 -- possible?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>>> Emacspeak AFAIK doesn't support multi-byte characters.  The problem is
>>> that many speech synthesises, particularly older hardware based ones like
>>> the dectalk, don't understand UTF-8 character sets.  If you send them
>>> a multibyte character, they either lock up, speak garbage or do something
>>> else unexpected.
>> 
>> That's not a good reason to prevent display of any other char.

> Nobody said it was a good reason, its just the reason.  I'd suggest you
> need to have familiarity with how it works and its internals and history
> before you can make a judgement,

> Given your contributions and long involvement with Emacs I'm surprised to
> see you make such an uninformed statement which contributes so little.

I'm sorry if I offended you.  I didn't mean to say that Emacspeak is crap or
stupid, really.  I just felt like it was useful to point out that the
justification that the limitation is due to the speech synthesis process's
own limitations was not quite correct.

The real reason is that Emacspeak has not been adjusted to the way Emacs
handles encoding, so the limitation is a result of historical circumstances
coupled with a lack of manpower/expertise/motivation to rework the code in
order to lift this restriction.  Nothing to be ashamed here.

Again, I'm sorry if I sounded like I was criticizing Emacspeak,


        Stefan


PS: How ironic that Emacspeak provides "the first really functional
    interface on Linux for [blind and] VI users".