Re: tlug: XEmacs and Kanji detection

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

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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>>>>> "Craig" == C Oda <craig@example.com> writes:

    Craig> during a recent switch from wnn-xemacs to canna-xemacs my
    Craig> xemacs seems to have lost the ability to detect and display
    Craig> kanji codes properly.

Or maybe it has regained it, since the problem is with detecting
Shift-JIS :-)  I admit that being able to detect Shift-JIS is a great
convenience, of course.  If you do

(setq coding-system-alist '(("" file automatic-conversion)))
; alist elements are (REGEXP FORMAT ENCODING)
; REGEXP matches file names, "" matches everything
; FORMAT is 'file, 'display, or 'keyboard
; ENCODING is one of automatic-conversion, shift-jis, euc-japan, and
;     so on

you should get automatic detection of EUC and New-JIS; I don't know if 
this will catch other JIS variants.  It does not proper handle
Shift-JIS; check and see if Yahoo properly declares `Content-Type:
text/html; charset="shit-jis"' on its nihongo HTML.  If so, w3.el
ought to be able to catch that and declare the content-type to Mule
somehow.

Why this isn't the default, I don't know; but my version of
XEmacs/Mule behaves differently after setting that from before.\

There seems to be some sort of interaction going on between Mule and
XEmacs, because JIS is properly displayed even with

(setq coding-system-alist '(("" file shift-jis)))

but the coding system indicator becomes ISO7, so presumably ISO-2022
is implemented in XEmacs outside of Mule.  I'm afraid that this means
that real multilingual support is a some way off in XEmacs.

    Craig> I find this rather puzzling since I was using XEmacs with
    Craig> Japanese support under w3.el fine a few weeks ago before
    Craig> the great disk wipe of 1997.

Um, what makes you think that the two versions of XEmacs/Mule have any 
code in common?  Beta versions of XEmacs have been coming out fast and 
furious recently.  Since one of the big changes was the integration of 
Mule, you can suppose that this has changed a lot.  Also, one would
imagine that since GNU Mule has undergone vast changes recently, and
the first release of XEmacs/Mule that I saw was clearly based on the
released code in Mule 2.3, probably some of the new GNU Mule code has
been integrated.  (This is just a guess, I don't have time to look.
But I seem to recall that XEmacs 20.0 accepted the old *conv-sys*
notation but XEmacs 20.2 does not.)

Anyway, it will probably be fixed in the next release.

    Craig> I've also added the following to my .Xresources

    Craig> XEmacs*FontSet-14: [snip]
    Craig> XEmacs*FontSet-16: [snip]
    Craig> XEmacs*FontSet-24: [snip]

In GNU Emacs, this causes the X server to read *all* of those fonts at 
startup, rather than loading them up on demand.  It also loads up the
default fontset anyway, even if you never use it.  Is XEmacs smarter?

    Craig> Then, I can get the added bonus of accessing EDICT from
    Craig> within any XEmacs application.  Nirvana awaits me.  I just
    Craig> have to get it working.  ;-)

Given that this did work and is now broken, I suspect that fixing it
will require a fair amount of C debugging and maybe some coding :-)
But we'll all thank you (verbally, not in cash) for your efforts!

Better just to wait for Nirvana, me thinks.

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com

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