Re: changing word boundaries

[Ernest Adrogué]

 1/11/09 @ 19:09 (+0000), thus spake Dave Love:
> Ernest Adrogué <eadrogue@gmx.net> writes:
> 
> > Hi there,
> >
> > The Catalan language has a ligature consisting in one
> > "l" character, followed by a middle dot ("·"), followed
> > by another "l". See here for more details:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L·l#Catalan
> >
> > Is there a way to make emacs aware of this, so that it
> > doesn't treat a word containing "l·l" as two separate
> > words?
> 
> [You're probably not really interested in word boundaries, just word
> constituents.  For an illustration of the difference, see variable
> `word-combining-categories' and what capitalized-words-mode does in
> Emacs 23.]
> 
> You should define a Catalan language environment to be used in ca_ES
> locales.  (I'm surprised I didn't do it, as there's a relevant input
> method.)  It should set the base syntax of · to word, and set a suitable
> default input method.  The existing one, `catalan-prefix', should
> presumably bind `~.' to `·', as in latin-prefix; it doesn't currently,
> and maybe needs other fixes.
> 
> The environment would be something like this (untested), which is
> probably better then trying to use categories.  [The default Latin-1
> character set is overridden in, say, ca_ES.UTF-8.]
>   
>   (push '("ca" . "Catalan") locale-language-names)
> 
>   (set-language-info-alist
>    "Catalan" '((tutorial . "TUTORIAL.es")     ; maybe...
>           (charset iso-8859-1)
>           (coding-system iso-latin-1 iso-latin-9)
>           (coding-priority iso-latin-1)
>           (input-method . "catalan-prefix")
>           (nonascii-translation . iso-8859-1)
>           (unibyte-display . iso-latin-1)
>           (setup-function
>            . (lambda ()
>                (modify-syntax-entry ?· "w" (standard-syntax-table))))
>           (exit-function
>            . (lambda ()
>                (modify-syntax-entry ?· "_" (standard-syntax-table))))
>           ;; Fixme:
>           ;; (sample-text . "Spanish (Español)        ¡Hola!")
>           (documentation . "\
>   This language environment uses the Latin-1 character set, sets
>   the default input method to \"catalan-prefix\", and sets the
>   syntax of `·' to word.  It selects the Spanish tutorial, in the
>   absence of a Catalan translation."))
>    '("European"))

Thanks a lot. Have you got any idea of where this should be
put in order to be loaded automatically at start-up?
I tried in init.el, and in a file in the "language" directory
in /usr/share/emacs/23.1/lisp/ to no avail.
It says that there's "no match", when I try to set the language
environment to Catalan interactively.

> You could make a bug report if you have more luck than me with reports
> about stuff I worked on.

I will try, once I get it to work :)

Cheers,

Ernest