Re: MULE shows gibberish; now what?

[Oliver Scholz]

Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org> writes:

> [A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to
> Kai
>  =?iso-8859-15?q?Gro=DFjohann?=
> <Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE>], who wrote in article 
> <vaf1y7huplb.fsf@lucy.cs.uni-dortmund.de>:
>> /----
>> |   character: ¤ (07444, 3876, 0xf24)
>> |     charset: latin-iso8859-15
>> |              (Right-Hand Part of Latin Alphabet 9 (ISO/IEC 8859-15): 
>> ISO-IR-203.)
>> |  code point: 36
>> |      syntax: w     which means: word
>> |    category: l:Latin  
>> | buffer code: 0x8E 0xA4
>> |   file code: 0x8E 0xA4 (encoded by coding system emacs-mule)
>> |     Unicode: 20AC
>> |        font: -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--14-130-75-75-C-70-ISO8859-15
>
> So it does not show which codepoint inside the font is chosen!

??? 

Have you actually read what Kai quoted? What information are you
missing exactly?

>> | There are text properties here:
>> |   fontified            t
>> \----
>> 
>> In the above output, it is easy to see if the glyph matches what it
>> should be.  I can do "man iso-8859-15" to look up what character has
>> code 128+36, and then I can compare it with the glyph.  And if the
>> "man" command told me to expect a Euro sign, but I'm seeing a
>> currency sign, then I know that something is wrong.
>
> As I said, I *know* that the output is wrong.  So how would what you
> say help me to debug/fix the problem.

Because the first step to solve a problem is to analyze what the
problem actually is. "It is wrong" is not specific enough.

[ You could of course write a program that writes random characters
in your .emacs and try if any of the character sequences thus
produced makes up for the right configuration. But personally I
prefer a proper analysis of the problem. ]

If I look at it from this point of view, it actually was very kind of
you that you told us that your problem has something to do with fonts
and encodings. You could as well have said:

"My Emacs does not work correctly." 

"What exactly goes wrong?"

"I *know* that it does not work correctly. So how would the answer to
that question help me do fix the problem?"

[...]
>>  Maybe
>> you have (accidentally) told Emacs to use a KOI-R font for the
>> iso-8859-5 encoding, or something like this.
>
> With -no-init-file?  I doubt it.  ;-)

If you already know everything, why do you ask here?

Nobody said that the misconfiguration takes places in
site-start.el. It could be in your .emacs or in your .Xdefaults, in
your .Xressources, even in /etc/X11/app-defaults/Emacs. Or your OS is
misconfigured? Who knows? Why don't you simply hit `C-u C-x =' and
show us the output instead of making a whole thread about arguing if
it is possible that this could be useful? We have no crystal ball
here, to make a remote diagnosis. To help you, we need your help and
that you apply the diagnostic tools that come with Emacs. If you are
not willing to cooperate, there is no way to help you.

Perhaps Kai is on the wrong track? Perhaps the output of `C-u C-x ='
does not reveal anything useful? Who knows? Why don't you simply show
us the output and let us see ourselves?

    -- Oliver

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