Re: non-ASCII characters in Automake source files

[Bruno Haible]

Paul Eggert writes:
> I'm not sure we're there yet.
> For one thing, the latest stable version of Emacs (21.3) still doesn't
> do the right thing out-of-the-box for UTF-8, at least not on my
> platform (Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r1, which is the latest stable Debian
> release).  So UTF-8 is still not convenient for developers like me.

For the small Western subset of Unicode that we use, Emacs 21.1 can
display UTF-8 encoded files well, if it is told about the encoding.
I use the following as first line in some text files:

                                               Hey Emacs! -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

and the following as first line in some Common Lisp files:

#0Y UTF-8 ;;;  This file is Unicode/UTF-8 encoded.  -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

and furthermore one can add clauses like

  ;; All the *.d and *.lisp sources are in UTF-8 encoding.
  (modify-coding-system-alist 'file "\\.\\(d\\|lisp\\)\\'" 'utf-8)

to one's .emacs.el.

If the result is not satisfying, then you are free to use another
editor - vim, gvim, kate, kword, kedit, gedit, etc all support UTF-8
files fine.

Among these, vim and kate qualify especially as "editors for
developers".

And if you want an Emacs variant nevertheless, XEmacs 21.4 with
MuleUCS or 21.5 (unstable, but doesn't need MuleUCS) may be your
choice.

> I found that it has some files in UTF-8 and others in Latin-1.

vim displays both correctly in an UTF-8 environment. It has a check
for UTF-8 contents when you open the file.

> I don't know how Bruno edits them.

When I'm working in an old ISO-8859-1/15 environment, indeed I have to
use "iconv -f ISO-8859-1/2 -t UTF-8" from time to time to convert an
contributor's name for inclusion in a ChangeLog.

> he is converting them from Latin-1 to UTF-8 as he runs across them?

Yes. Those files in ISO-8859-1 in the gettext distribution have not
been modified in a long time.

> config/elisp-comp
> gettext-runtime/intl/locale.alias
> gettext-runtime/man/help2man
> gettext-tools/man/help2man
> gettext-tools/projects/GNOME/teams.html

These come from outside gettext.

> gettext-tools/misc/po-mode.el
> gettext-tools/misc/po-compat.el

These have been left in ISO-8859-1, so as not to cause problems with
older Emacses.

> gettext-tools/src/x-java.l's use of Latin-1 is a typo: it is a narrow
> space in line 180 that "flex" interprets as part of the regular
> expression, which is not what was intended.

Thanks for noticing it! I wouldn't have seen it.

Bruno