Re: Cyrillic vs UTF-8

[Dave Love]

Simon Josefsson <address@hidden> writes:

> Another problem was that Emacs,
> when asked to load the file as UTF-8, picked a Unicode font that
> didn't include this glyphs.

I assume that's the general xfree86 4 lossage I mentioned in PROBLEMS.
I can't remember how the font will get chosen by default, but there's
code in cyrillic.el that should allow mule-unicode-0100-24ff
characters to be displayed with an 8859-5 or KOI font.  You can also
change into which Emacs characters utf-8 decodes.

> To workaround the problem, users need to
> define a fontset, and use it.

Yes (or purge the unhelpful fonts).  If the combination of the
PROBLEMS entry and the manual aren't good enough, suggestions would be
useful.

> Doing this is rather user unfriendly (X resource, or elisp) so I
> suggested making it possible to customize fontsets.

Yes.  I mostly implemented customizing the default set (which I think
is all that needs customizing) for Emacs 22, but was stymied by the
treatment of the default face somewhere.  I complained about that some
time ago, but it never got resolved and I've not had time to go back
and try to sort it out.  (I think that problem is the same in Emacs 21
and 22, but the fontset mechanism in the latter is different.)

> My other Cyrillic thread was that (double-width) cyrillic

I assume that means the Cyrillic parts of the CJK charsets.

> isn't possible to save as UTF-8 at all.

It's possible if you amend the tables defined in ucs-tables.el or
utf-8.el -- wherever it is now.  I can't remember whether there are
potential problems with that, but I at least thought it wasn't
worthwhile.  If you want to experiment, Mule-UCS has tables with the
non-CJK characters labelled for JISX &c.

> This was fixed by adding a
> PROBLEMS entry that says not all of Unicode is supported.

It looks as though that needs work...

> I hope this summarizes the thread.

Thanks.

[This has got strange recipients because the original mail had
`Mail-Copies-To: nobody'.  As far as I know, that's a non-standard
header for news only, so perhaps there's a Gnus bug there.]