Re: umlauts (8bit characters) input

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 01.02.2005 um 01:41 schrieb Hendrik Sattler:

> Peter Dyballa wrote:
> > ;       (set-language-environment               'UTF-8)
> >          (set-default-coding-systems             'utf-8)
> >          (setq file-name-coding-system           'utf-8)
> >          (setq default-buffer-file-coding-system 'utf-8)
> >          (setq coding-system-for-write           'utf-8)
> > ;       (set-keyboard-coding-system             'utf-8)
> >          (set-terminal-coding-system             'utf-8)
> > ;;      (set-clipboard-coding-system            'utf-8)
> > ;;      (set-selection-coding-system            'utf-8)
> > ;       (set-language-environment               'German)
>
> I don't understand why emacs should need all that. There are locales 
> and
> they define a system charset, emacs should use that as default.

These setting show how complicated it is to translate between the many 
systems GNU Emacs supports. It's not only Latin scripts! Have a look at 
the HELLO page: C-h H. And particularly two settings can become import 
when you're interacting with a window system: clipboard-coding-system 
and selection-coding-system. There is in the Help menu a very excessive 
entry: Describe -> Show all of Mule Status. Or simply M-x mule-diag. 
It'll give you pointers to stay for a few weeks in info-mode ...

> > It's always helpful to check what Emacs actually receives: C-h k and 
> > then
> > you type the umlaut.
>
> It gets M-| for the 'ü', '|' is 0x7C and 'ü' ist 0xFC, so the 8th bit 
> is
> ignored.
> Does emacs care for readline settings?

I don't think so. readline would be used in shell-mode or eshell-mode, 
if at all. Are you running Emacs freely as an X11 client or is it 
no-windows inside a terminal emulation? In the second case you're a bit 
dependant of what the terminal emulation is doing. It might convert 
8bit to 7bit. In both cases you have to set an appropriate 
input-method, as mule-diag will reveal.

Do you have test files à la 'char-representation = oct dec hex its 
description (to help you recognize what Emacs is doing to that glyph)', 
for example "ü = 374 = 252 = FC = U+00FC : LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH 
DIAERESIS"? In any case it would be very helpful (for Emacs) to give a 
hint like "-*- mode: Text; coding: iso-8859-15; -*-" in the file's 
header to help it choose the right character set.

I do hope that others on this list have made more progress than both of 
us and add some to this thread! For example I would like to have shell 
and dired-buffers display in UTF-8 because the file names in Mac OS X 
are of that kind. In shell it works with ls when I let Emacs run in 
Apple's Terminal (emulation).

I hope that GNU Emacs 25 solves all problems.


> I really want to get that guy that said that ASCII and thus 7bit is a 
> useful
> default :-(((((

Oh no, why has the world to be so stubborn and keep writing in so my 
scripts? Why is a comic's use of script not sufficient?

--
Mit friedvollen Grüßen

  Pete      <\
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