Re: Chinese characters support

[Lee Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>]

>>>>> "Charles" == Charles Muller <acmuller@gol.com> writes:

    Charles> Kai wrote:
    >> Then I typed M-x view-hello-file RET.  This showed me some
    >> Chinese (and Japanese, and Korean) characters.  If you see
    >> empty boxes instead of the Chinese characters, then some fonts
    >> are missing.

    Charles> I should be pointed out, nonetheless, that it is a bad
    Charles> idea to cite the hello file as an example of
    Charles> international script functionality, 

Why  not?   That  file  really illustrates  the  international  script
functionality.


    Charles> since it is set in an encoding that virtually no one ever
    Charles> uses (at least in the CJK world), 

That's  a  problem with  encoding,  not  Emacs's international  script
functionality.  Maybe,  you have "conformance to  Unicode and national
encodings" in mind when you said "international script functionality".
They're different issues.



    Charles> and it is quite often the case that that file will
    Charles> display fine despite the fact that CJK won't work in
    Charles> utf-8 or native East Asian encodings. 

C-x RET c utf-8 C-x s ... does save my Chinese text files in UTF-8.
C-x RET c big5 C-x s ... does save my Chinese text files in BIG5 --
the "native" encoding for traditional Chinese.

And needless to say, I can read  files in UTF-8 and big5 using C-x RET
c ... C-x  C-f.  (For Emacs 20, I need to  install an external package
for Unicode encodings: MuleUCS or something like that.)


    Charles> Someone should either get rid of that file or save it in
    Charles> a relevant encoding.

Since no  "native" encoding preserves the details  that the emacs-mule
encoding saves, that "showoff" file  must be kept in emacs-mule.  e.g.
the  section "Difference  among chinese  characters in  GB,  JIS, KSC,
BIG5" would  be impossible with Unicode,  GB, JIS, KSC  or BIG5.  Only
emacs-mule have enough coding  space to accomodate all characters from
these  encodings   and  yet   not  unify  them   to  make   them  look
non-identical.




-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     李守敦(Big5)                    ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ) 

E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee