Re: unicode internal

Hrvoje> I'm a bit hazy on the concept of tracking "language". How Hrvoje> is that supposed to work, exactly? For you, *much* better than current Mule. :-) Hrvoje> I mean, a word processor can do it because it has a chance Hrvoje> to save its markup when saving the document. Emacs works, Hrvoje> in most cases, with bare characters, Bare character case. For almost all users in most cases documents will be monolingual, and in the first go-round we will disambiguate German from Croatian in the same way that we disambiguate ISO 8859-15 from ISO 8859-2 now---query the environment and if necessary the user. The second stage of development is to use the classifier techniques Ben has advocated to autodetect the language. For casually multilingual documents, we'll just use a single priority list of fonts and go down the list until we have a font that has the character. We should also provide a mark region---evoke menu---select language UI. For plaintext Unicode documents, we should offer to save with Plane 14 language tags. These MUST be ignored by conforming applications that don't handle them, but of course they'll screw up byte counts and digest hashes, so we'll have to allow them to be disabled. Not to mention the odds that applications conform to something so esoteric aren't great. Serious multilingual users will have their own ways of marking language in stored documents, we need to provide an API to make it easy to parse those and markup the buffer. Hrvoje> or with charset (not language) annotations, as is the Hrvoje> case with coding cookies or with Gnus processing MIME Hrvoje> messages. Charset -> language heuristics are easy and moderately reliable. If that fails, fontconfig (for example) provides an API which queries the font for "can you handle this repertoire of characters". Then the worst that can happen with either heuristic is that a font the user thinks looks pretty nice for some other language will shadow the font that the user thinks is optimal for this language. We can also provide a Mule and/or MIME charset->font mapping facility if needed. -- 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.