Dan> xemacs-beta or xemacs-mule? xemacs-beta. The first I saw of the whole thread was a post by Olivier Galibert <19990916163807.A6395(a)nemesis.ncsl.nist.gov&gt; which was also posted to xemacs-review and xemacs-mule. Bitching about Mule on xemacs-mule at least has the effect of stirring up the people who might do something about it. Dan> My recent comp.emacs.xemacs post (which was apparently what Dan> was forwarded) explained it in brief and included a URL to my Dan> original comp.emacs.xemacs bug report, which explained it in Dan> more detail. I did not receive this; furthermore, it was not quoted in any of the posts I received. Dan> I'm not advocating removing it. I was suggesting: Dan> ^NormalJapaneseTextLooksLikeThisAllRunTog$ Dan> ^etherWithNotEnoughPunctuationAndLinesAre$ Dan> ^BrokenWillyNillyExceptThatALineShouldNot$ Dan> ^StartWithPunctuation, Including $ Dan> ^Explicit WhiteSpace.$ Violates standards, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars. It's also very ugly. The standard alternative looks like this: ^NormalJapaneseTextLooksLikeThisAllRunTog$ ^etherWithNotEnoughPunctuationAndLinesAre$ ^BrokenWillyNillyExceptThatALineShouldNot$ ^StartWithPunctuation, Including Explici$ ^t WhiteSpace.$ This is remarkably ugly to an American eye, but Japanese probably wouldn't think so. Dan> And if "Including Explicit WhiteSpace" is in romaaji, which I Dan> take it is the most common usage of explicit whitespace in Dan> Japanese writing, you can't always avoid that ragged right Dan> side (in fixed-width text), so the above should be Dan> acceptable. 全然 チ ガ ウ よ。 No, the one common usage of explicit whitespace is lining things up in columns. Trying to identify a second most typical behavior would be hard. It would be like trying to identify common uses of the ASCII tilde in English. Dan> However, if you're using explicit white space in Japanese, Dan> you can't have a clean right side in all cases. True. So you do the best you can to make it esthetic. Since this is non-standard usage, "esthetic" is going to be very idiosyncratic. Applying Western ideas of "esthetic" here is highly unlikely to make the majority of Japanese happy. Dan> In all my non-email, non-newsgroup-post buffers, I set the Dan> fill-column to 80 (and have my XEmacs window 81 columns wide Dan> -- an annoying necessity), so anytime there's an extra space Dan> at the end of the line, I see the line-wrap "curly arrow", Dan> not just "empty space". Personal preference; it depends on how many are like you, how many like me. (I would _never_ do what you do unless I worked under a strict coding standard.) The point here is that the default behavior needs to be compatible with something that can be easily adapted to by the great majority of users. For non-Mule XEmacs, I agree with you and Hrvoje: it must be the traditional "fill column is a hard limit and trailing whitespace is always trimmed". Old-timers are used to it, newbies learn it very fast, and it is compatible with typical coding standards. For Japanese, it must be kinsoku. What to do with space is problematic; since removing embedded spaces is destroying intentionally introduced textual data, we should default to leaving them in. My confusion was that the first I saw of this thread was a post about the definition of "kinsoku", and it was posted to xemacs-mule. So I assumed it was a Mule problem. It's not; the generic code which was supposed to apply both with Mule and without it was buggy. Dan> Okay, you got me there. I didn't re-read the documentation Dan> before saying that, and I was remembering it as being defined Dan> mechanically in terms of fill-column. Well, one of the subsidiary functions is. And it's obviously a natural pattern of thought. I sympathize with that very much---that's essential to ease of use---but if it were actually stated in the documentation, either kinsoku processing for Japanese or the documentation is buggy and should be fixed. Dan> I thought we were just talking about two different views of Dan> "getting all the columns one is entitled to" in XEmacs. No, this is a matter of The Japanese Manual of Style. -- 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 two straight lines for? "Free software rules."