Your 2006-11-05 change of how font is searched for given mule charset when instancing font specifiers is clearly user visible. Still there is no documentation changes reflecting that, let alone addition to `NEWS'. One of incompatibilities is that currently the call: (set-charset-registry 'ascii "") signals error: (invalid-argument "Not an X11 REGISTRY-ENCODING combination" "") Before the change doing this particular elisp call had an obvious and a very useful effect. That is, user could easily view raw text without explicit mule decoding.

This is extremely valueable when viewing data items consisting of snippets of text in different 8-bit encodings. Those easily result from erroneous process output, or simply are some legacy text files. This was possible because could obviously specify xemacs to display raw text charsets in the very first font retrieved from font specifier for particular locale, like this. (let ((l '(ascii latin-iso8859-1))) (while l (set-charset-registry (car l) "") (setq l (cdr l)))) Then would just set font specifications in default (or even perhaps other) face font specifiers for frame (or window), and could rely xemacs to display raw text in exactly the font as specified.

Another incompatibility is that `control-1' characters are always displayed as `\OCTAL', not as code points of some 8-bit font. The latter may be disired for the same reasons. How do we view raw text in user specified font after the change?

How do we check whether `set-charset-registry' in given version and build implements old or new data format? Please document.