Re: Chinese characters support

[Charles Muller]

Kai wrote:

> Really?  The HELLO file shows characters from a lot of different
> encodings, and if used as such, then it is quite useful.
> 
> > and it is quite often the case that that file will display fine
> > despite the fact that CJK won't work in utf-8
> 
> There are known problems with CJK support in UTF-8, but the situation
> has improved greatly in the development version of Emacs.

I know that, and I am not contesting that point. But again, the HELLO file
is not a utf-8 file. It is also not a form of JIS or other East Asian
encoding, so the fact that one can display multilingual scripts by opening
that file does not mean that they will be able to display them in Big5, JIS,
or whatever. If you check the archives for "utf-8+cjk", you will see that we 
have had a few
threads in the past year that dealt with problems trying to display CJK and
other international scripts, in which the advice was given to look at the
Hello file. As a person who has been working with international scripts and
utf-8 for a number years, I know firsthand the ability to be able to read
this file doesn't usually mean much. People who recommend checking this file
are usually people who don't use double-byte East Asian languages.

> The file is in a relevant encoding: it's the encoding used by Emacs
> internally.  (Or rather, an encoding close to the internal encoding.)

Relevant to whom? It's not in utf-8, right? Most of the problems people have
been having with CJK display in Emacs (at least until the appearance of
21.3.5) have to do with problems getting utf-8 to work, and the hello file
will still display even when these problems are not resolved.

No one that I know who works in XML or with East Asian international scripts
works in utf-7, so while that encoding format may be relevant for those who
are programming Emacs internally, it is not relevant for anyone using Emacs
to do multilingual XML or HTML publication, because no one uses it. That's
what I mean when I say "not relevant."

It is not my purpose to badmouth Emacs handling of Unicode. I know that
people have been working very hard to resolve these problems, and from what
I have been hearing, once everyone has copies of 21.3.5 installed with the
right Mule setup, this will be a past issue. Hopefully, somewhere along the
line, the Hello file will also graduate to utf-8.

Regards,

Chuck

---------------------------
Charles Muller  <acmuller@gol.com>
Faculty of Humanities,  Toyo Gakuen University
Digital Dictionary of Buddhism and CJKV-English Dictionary 
[http://www.acmuller.net]
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