Re: emacs, umlauts, x-windows text mark and paste

[josh buhl]

Here's my reply:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [uzs33d@uni-bonn.de: gtk2, iso14755, pasting non-ascii 
characters, and the x-windows clipboard]
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 10:50:25 +0100
From: josh buhl <uzs33d@uni-bonn.de>
To: Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org>
CC: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
References: <E1AWn7Q-0006EZ-Fs@fencepost.gnu.org> 
<200312180215.LAA00397@etlken.m17n.org>

Kenichi Handa wrote:
>>However, the gtk2 apps and the non-gtk2 apps aside from emacs, all
>>seem to be able to paste this text in from each other properly. Only
>>emacs has this problem.
>
>
> Perhaps, that because the other apps use UTF8_STRING request
> on selection (which is XFree86 extention) but Emacs 21.3
> uses only COMPOUND_TEXT request (standard of X).  The latest
> CVS version of Emacs supports UTF8_STRING.

That sounds plausible. If I tried to checkout and compile the latest cvs
of emacs to test this, would I have to somehow enable utf8_string, or
would it be automatically supported?


>>This behaviour is independent of what I've set LC_ALL to before
>>starting emacs, but if I logout and login with default session
>>language set to german, then all the pasting functions work properly.
>
>
> ???  Then, in what locale were you running gtk2 apps when
> pasting didn't work?

The system default, which is no default language (as recommended during
the debian locales configuration script for mult-language systems), so
just POSIX:

josh@spleen:~$ locale
LANG=POSIX
LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=
josh@spleen:~$ locale -a
C
de_DE
de_DE@euro
de_DE.iso88591
de_DE.iso885915@euro
de_DE.utf8
de_DE.utf8@euro
deutsch
en_US
en_US.iso88591
en_US.utf8
german
POSIX
josh@spleen:~$

But like I said, I can open a terminal, set LC_ALL=en_US.utf8, start
emacs, and the pasting does not work (but only for emacs, it still works
with other apps). *HOWEVER*, if I log out, select any of the available
locales for the session language in the gdm login, e.g. de_DE.ISO-8859-1
or en_US.UTF-8, and then login, then all the pasting works properly.

I suppose that the session locale setting might also alter the way the X
selection buffer deals with the marked text.

>>The garbaged text corresponds exactly to the unicode hex encodings for
>>the characters. for example the unicode hex encoding of ß is 00DF and
>>emacs displays the pasted in ß as \x{00DF}. This certainly isn't a
>>coincidence.
>
>
> Emacs never generates such \x{.....} notation automatically.
> So, the text should be generated on sender site.

This corroborates the suggestion that the session locale setting is also
effecting the text in the x selection buffer. But there's still the
question (except for your utf8-string explanation) of why other apps can
insert this, but emacs can't.

-jb