Re: help needed with emacs. mule, euc-japan

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Simon" == Simon Cozens <simon@example.com> forwards:

>  > i.  On mh in mule, in the window of 'inbox', Japanese
>  > cannot appear properly.  In the other windows in mh in mule,
>  > i. e., when I am writing or reading any particular mail, it is ok.

IIRC, mh-e does not support Japanese natively.  What it does is simply
spew the message into a buffer.

In the case of the summary buffer, the headers contain MIME
encoded-words (non-ASCII characters are illegal in headers), which
must be decoded by the application.

Message buffers, on the other hand, can contain any character set, and
mule automatically decodes these.

If this is the problem, you have the following options:

(1) Switch to VM.  VM supports MIME internally and is easy to use.
    It expects a Unix mbox folder, however, not an mh folder.  I
    believe mh supplies utilities for these conversions.

(2) Switch to Gnus.  Gnus supports MIME internally, but is somewhat
    complex to use.  Gnus can use a file-per-message storage format,
    but I don't know if it is mh-compatible.

(3) Switch to mew or wanderlust; I never used them, I don't know.  mew
    does have the advantage of using mh folder format, or used to, anyway.

(4) Install tm and use the tm-mhe package to handle MIME for MH-E.
    Unfortunately, tm is orphaned; its author has moved on to SEMI.

(5) Install SEMI.  I don't know whether it supports MH-E out of the
    box.  Also, it's pretty beta; some versions are safe, some
    versions massively mangle outgoing mail.  I don't think there
    should be any problems with just Japanese mail, but attachments
    and other complex processing occasionally is buggy in some
    versions.  (This was true 12-18 months ago; I don't currently get
    much mail from SEMI users so I don't know current state.  I do
    know development continues apace, and code reorganizations are
    frequent so it may be unstable.)

>  > ii. Just after logging in, at sable% prompt, when I enter the
>  > command 'mail', any japanese letter cannot be READ,
>  > while I can properly WRITE in 'mail' programme.

You need an X terminal emulator (such as kterm or some versions of
rxvt) which can handle Japanese, an input method, such as kinput2, and
a dictionary server (Wnn, Canna[1], ATOK are the ones I know of at the
moment).  Alternatively, you can use a TTY terminal emulator such as
kon2 on a graphics console.

You also need a shell that can handle Japanese.  ash and bash don't
like it, I forget whether zsh is any better.  I don't use ksh or csh
so can't comment; I believe there is a tcsh-i18n specifically for
handling multibyte languages like Japanese.

If you've got all that, more precise descriptions of the problems
would be welcome (or screen shots -- if it's large feel free to mail
me directly).


Footnotes: 
[1]  Canna allegedly has security problems.  It is the one I use, anyway.

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