Uwe Brauer wrote: 21.5 has vastly/completely rewritten unicode support. with my unicode-internal workspace, it will certainly support this (whether or not you compile --unicode-internal). gnu emacs 21.x has charsets into which unconvertible unicode chars are stuffed, so they can be undone upon output rather than lost. i've recently suggested a similar approach for XEmacs 21.4.

Aidan Kehoe wrote: all right, touche. i don't understand mule-ucs.

Uwe> hi has this meanwhile be applied? No; there's no patch, it's pure vaporware. In 21.4 Unicode is handled via Mule-UCS, which is unmaintained unsupported orphaned etc etc. It works well enough for undemanding work like reading email, but if you need robust support, you really need to use 21.5. There are many small problems with Mule-UCS, and there will never be a serious attempt to fix them all. If Ben has ideas for working around Mule-UCS in 21.4, I don't know what they are. 21.5 does not yet deal with this particular issue, but within the next few weeks Ben will return from vacation and he may have some work that addresses this in preparation. -- 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.

Zhang> I don't think xemacs-21.5 completely support utf-8 either. Zhang> None of the chinese GBK(a charset of about 23000 chinese Zhang> characters which is the most popular used charset in china) Zhang> other than GB2312(a charset of about 7000 chinese characters Zhang> which was used in the early 1980s) character can be inputed Zhang> in a file of utf-8 encoding. The sad question is then, does GNU Emacs handles that better ???(on the other hand for me there are more fonts problems in GNU Emacs then in Xemacs).

Uwe> The sad question is then, does GNU Emacs handles that better Uwe> ??? Zhang's problem is irrelevant to you, unless you specifically want support for recently (ie, post-1980) standardized Chinese or Indian characters. UTF-8 is supported about as well as GNU Emacs does AFAIK, but we only support a subset of all Unicode characters, and don't support combining characters yet, only the pre-combined equivalents. I believe they support a few characters of interest to Europeans that we don't "out of the box." I expect that XEmacs 21.5 will make very rapid progress in the next few months, but this depends very much on Ben Wing, and of course will be accompanied by substantial instability for a while. Aidan Kehoe also threatened to work on the "unknown characters problem", so that may get done quickly even if Ben doesn't do it. (I'd like to work on it but I don't think I have time to be the lead.) -- 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.

Zhang> I don't think xemacs-21.5 completely support utf-8 either. Zhang> None of the chinese GBK Not in current CVS, many of the modern character sets are not yet supported. This will probably get done in the near future when we abolish charsets as such and go to Unicode internally, but that's not quite working yet. Ben is due back from vacation by now, we should see some progress on this in February. -- 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.