Yes, really! In XEmacs MULE 21.5 (and 21.4 too).
Cyrillic letters are being displayed correctly in XEmacs under MULE, that's
true. BUT! many files, written in Russian, espesially in news groups contain
non-cyrillic graphic characters. Examples are: "em dash" and "en dash", single
and double quotes [1] in cp1251, box drawing in koi8-r.
XEmacs maps codepoints that correspond to the mentioned chars into chinese and
japanese charsets. I don't have ISO-2022 on my hands, but I am pretty sure
that the standard positions those chars in Far East charsets.
This leads to a funny result -- when opening a text file in RUSSIAN, XEmacs
warns that it can not instantiate fonts for JAPANESE (CHINESE, KOREAN)!
Notice: Unable to instantiate font for charset korean-ksc5601, face default
Notice: Unable to instantiate font for charset chinese-cns11643-1, face default
Notice: Unable to instantiate font for charset japanese-jisx0208, face default
That is not a problem, but an annoying inconvenience.
I see severals ways to fix it.
1. Add entries to display table that map graphic characters to reasonable
substitutions (e.g. "en dash" to "-", "em dash" to "--").
2. Introduce a new non-standard charset that contains such characters and
specify a particular display policy for it.
3. Wait until full Unicodizing internals and hope the problem will disappear.
Current implementation of Unicode support maps box drawing and friends to
Far East charsets.
Any comments/opinions?
Nick.
Footnotes:
[1] MS Word loves to insert them into saved plain text