today i finally got the with-mule version to bootstrap-temacs itself, and the resulting xemacs more or less actually works! enclosed is a screen shot. as you can see, some is still messed up, e.g. cyrillic -- this is because the windows cyrillic code page does not map cleanly onto iso8859-5. this will be fixed as soon as I implement proper unicode translation tables. at that point, we can do all our display by converting to unicode and using the unicode display primitives, which are present even in win95.

the second screen shot shows off some of the locale work i've been implementing. if you go to the control panel and bring up "Regional Settings" and choose Japanese for your locale, XEmacs comes up with a Japanese splash screen! Internally it's actually calling setlocale() to determine the locale, and later on, when you change language environments, a new setlocale() occurs to match the new language environment [actually each language environment has stored in it a whole list of potential locales, and it tries them all until one succeeds; this is my brute-force approach to dealing with the utter lack of any locale standards]. That way, at least in theory, you can access your Japanese-named files, switch to a Hebrew language environment within the same XEmacs, and then access your Hebrew-named files. What I'm working toward, and I've put in a lot of backbone support for, is using Unicode throughout as much as possible for all external communication under Windows. This avoids many of these problems and allows true multilingualism -- esp. since Windows is built on top of Unicode. The only monkey wrench here is that Win95 support for Unicode is limited, so we will have to have both systems (locale and Unicode) in place, using Unicode whenever we can, and locale for all the rest.

very many thanks to ikeyama, who jumpstarted this whole project and is still responsible for the font and redisplay code in xemacs/mule. it would have been a lot harder without his motivation and his critical code in areas that are the most confusing to me.

my goal now is to test under x windows asap and then check in what i have, before working some more on Unicode and other snazzier stuff. i really really really need to take a break for awhile (perhaps a week or two), giving my hands some time to rest, and it would be nice if others could contribute during that time.

I will also be posting some design documents I've written on adding Unicode support and doing other
such things to XEmacs.

ben

--
Ben

In order to save my hands, I am cutting back on my mail. I also write
as succinctly as possible -- please don't be offended. If you send me
mail, you _will_ get a response, but please be patient, especially for
XEmacs-related mail. If you need an immediate response and it is not
apparent in your message, please say so. Thanks for your understanding.