a thought on coding systems

There are, alas, more coding systems around in the world than there were. In particular, there's the GBK system, and what's worse, there are GBK encoded articles on Usenet that claim to be GB2312. Firefox at least seems to silently accommodate this and treat GB2312 as GBK. Standard XEmacs doesn't support GBK. There is an add-on, but I haven't seen whether it works, and it's a typical horrible CCL/conversion mess. It occurred to me that it would be very easy to make a small extension to the ISO2022 coding systems: add a new property ('gr-gl-is-g2 or something) that would mean: if you see a sequence c1,c2 of characters in the GR,GL ranges, treat it as referring to (c1 & 0x7F, c2) in the G2 charset of the coding system. Then one would just add this property to the gb coding system, set g2 to be a new charset representing the lower columns of GBK, and Bob's your uncle. (This is also, IMHO, how Big5 should have been handled.) Thoughts? I might well do it for myself, since nowadays I compile my own XEmacs everywhere anyway, but I wondered if it might be worth having in the mainstream - in which case, I'd propose using one of the remaining free official 2D charsets for the lower half of GBK. -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta