Re: etc/HELLO markup etc.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2018 11:41:05 -0800
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > If Han unification is the only important user of the charset property,
> > then yes, we could remove the rest of the charset info from HELLO.
> 
> Yes, that's the case.

Says you.  The issue at hand is precisely whether that is so, or just
your opinion and tendency.

> the non-Han markup is merely a relic of that file's old method of 
> encoding

It could be both a relic and an important piece of information.

> one cannot see the markup's effect when visiting the file with
> either C-h h or find-file in the usual way.

Of course, one can: via the fonts used to display the various scripts.

> > In what way most of what you say is not applicable to etc/enriched.txt
> > in general?
> 
> Other forms of enriched-text markup are typically easily visible.

Typically, but not exclusively.  There's read-only property, there's
the 'display' property, and to some extent even the "fixed" face.

> > What other facilities are you aware of or can suggest for showing
> > multilingual text with such level of detail and precision?
> 
> In practice the most common and often the best way to deal with the situation 
> is 
> to do what the non-markup part of etc/HELLO is already doing: indicate within 
> the text itself what language or script is being used, to help the reader who 
> may be unacquainted with them, and with enough punctuation within the text so 
> that the reader can easily see what's going on.

That's useless for preserving text properties, so won't fit the bill.

> One example of such an error is that "日本語" has no charset properties even 
> though it's obviously intended to use a Japanese script (since it follows the 
> word "Japanese").

Thanks, I fixed that.

> I'm sure there are others.

Please report them if you find them.