Ben> I'd like to find out what the locale names on each system Ben> are, and what encodings are used. For now let's just Ben> concentrate on Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian, which Ben> are the stickiest problems. So ... Sad, isn't it; the app shouldn't need to know.... You should be able to implement a function which gets the locale set on the system and asks the user to match it with a locale that XEmacs knows about (and to send a bug report to xemacs.org!) -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."

Ben> well, i want to be able to *SWITCH TO* a different locale Ben> from within XEmacs. therefore i need the exact locale names. Sorry, I understood that; what I meant is implementing a function which intercepts the user's request for something intelligible like "Japanese" and says "uh, I don't know how to do that on your box, is that the thing you have set in your LANG?" I think that at this time it is probably a very bad idea for XEmacs to switch to locales for any reason other than a user request; the names are more consistent than the behavior. :-( And the whole locale model is pretty broken, see eg Didier's comments in input-method-*.c. Users who are savvy enough to know that they want behavior different from that documented in the XEmacs manual and that they can get it by asking for a particular locale on their system, are probably savvy enough to know how to tell you what the locale is. - University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."