Re: changing the values of iso-8859-* charsets

Ben> it's the other way around. the current situation is Ben> incompatible with the X11 fonts, so we have to hack the Ben> values using the bogus `graphic' characteristic. Nothing bogus about it, it's perfectly (ISO 2022) standard. The X fonts' use of character codes as font indexes where they fit into the appropriate space is perfectly reasonable (although I've never actually looked closely at an ISO-8859 font, thus the confusion on my part, mea culpa), but is not of any particular interest here. Note that multibyte fonts (like Japanese) do assume font indices in the 32-127 range (usually 33-126, actually). Ben> note that in the new world, charsets can have values > 127 in Ben> any case. cf. big5, shift-jis, etc. Please stop abusing the word "charset" for an object that is only well-defined in a workspace I have no access to. It's confusing you, too, it would seem. Ben> so when i'm creating a new charset like `latin-windows-1252', Ben> which is compatible with iso-8859-1 but has extra chars in Ben> the range 128-159, do i do the right thing and have its chars Ben> in the range 128-255 be indexed as 128-255 (and hence be Ben> inconsistent with the `latin-iso8859-1' charset), or do i do Ben> the wrong thing and move its range down to 0-127? and then Ben> it appears to have ascii control chars in the range 0-31, but Ben> they aren't control chars, value 10 is not linefeed, value 13 Ben> is not cr, etc.? You're thinking in terms of Mule charsets. Don't, it's no help. Those values should _never_ _ever_ appear in a context where they could be confused with characters. We don't need named coded character sets internally, we don't need to associate random octets with charsets to make characters. (Except for backward compatibility, where backward is spelled P E R V E R S E.) We only need subsets of Unicode. Abstractly, characters from internal text (LISP characters, strings, and buffers) should only ever be mapped to their Unicode values, and then from Unicode to external coding systems for I/O. If you're worrying about the practical problems of mapping Unicode characters to font indicies, please don't bother. It's a practical problem, yes, but you aren't going to enforce sanity on fonts by perpetuating the charset bogosity. For now, _any old hack_ will do, just get glyphs on the screen for the fonts you use. As long as the API looks like a table and handles two-byte indicies, we can generalize and optimize the internals for space later, if we even need to. I agree, we'll need named font index tables (a la Cmaps). We've already got the tables in etc/unicode. Give them their Unicode names, provide an aliasing mechanism, add an xemacs vendor directory, and put anything we need that we don't already have in there. Footnotes: [1] If you read this as an anti-Microsoft rant, you're missing the point. -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.