Re: Characters lost when saving UTF-8 file on win32 (21.5.16)
I was able to build 21.5 easily on Win32 - after some initial wrestling
with config.inc, I was fine. I'm using MSVC.
I did some more testing with the version I built on a Debian box. Saving
the mentioned file produces exactly the same results on both MSVC Win32
and Debian (Cygwin build does not report any errors, but running it just
goes back to command line after some time - this might be another thing
to report).
This seems to be consistent with what Stephen already said.
Now, on the subject of Unicode support in current editor world. I deal
with Unicode every day (http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu) and one of the
most painful parts of the work is dealing with Unicode text data. I
don't need sophisticated editing tools, but rather need the editor to be
able to swallow utf-16, utf-8 and (ideally) backslash U format. Unipad
can do that, but is too expensive. Also, I frequently need to identify a
codepoint under the cursor (properties etc...). This is a great task to
do with xemacs - if it only supported Unicode well. Other Unicode
enabled Win32 editors are either clumsy and ugly or not multi-platform
or are no better than Notepad.
To summarize - I was really looking forward to using Unicode enabled
xemacs. Guess I'll have to wait some more.
Regards,
v.
Sars, Camillo wrote:
>As far as looking into other editors, xemacs works great for me -
I
>don't intend to change it. The problem of a good Unicode
>editor is very much present.
>
>
I have been tracking XEmacs for this purpose on Win32 for quite some time.
Actually, I would even settle for a decent subset of Unicode. Unfortunately
Win32 Unicode editing is simply not supported in XEmacs stable, and the 21.5
branch does not produce binaries - being beta.
As Stephen put it:
>>Replacing the current Mule internal representation with Unicode is
>>
>>
planned, but not
>>going to happen soon.
>>
>>
As it looks right now, simple unicode editing should be done with GNU Emacs,
and to get good unicode support, you have to use (g)vim. It works well even
on Win32, but using it is a pain for someone who has emacsen in their nervous
system.
I'm sorry Stephen, but the amount of UTF-8 encoded messages in newsgroups and
mail is going up all the time. Win32 XEmacs stable has problems even with
ISO-8859-15, not to mention UTF-8. We need a release of 21.5 to get Mule
support on Win32. Even then, any advanced unicode usage would be beyond
XEmacs.
As I have noted earlier, I can't build 21.5 myself, but I could provide test
results if a (net)installer would be provided. I've tried out some of the
unofficial 21.5 builds that have been available, but submitting bugs on old
versions is useless.
I honestly find it fairly tragic that XEmacs running on a Unicode-native OS
fails to provide any decent support for Unicode. As it stands, I can't
recommend XEmacs on Win32. And as I tend to support cross-platform
applications, that means I can't recommend XEmacs on any platform.
I wish this would change. But I don't see that on the horizon.
Camillo