Re: MULE shows gibberish; now what?

[Ilya Zakharevich]

[A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to
Kai
 =?iso-8859-15?q?Gro=DFjohann?=
<Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE>], who wrote in article 
<vaf3crul308.fsf@lucy.cs.uni-dortmund.de>:
> > Well, this is not enough.  A font in gb2312 encoding *has* cyrillic
> > glyphs.  Will Emacs use them if they are present?
> 
> At the moment, the functionality is lacking indeed.  There is a file
> latin1-disp.el which allows you to display some latin-2 characters
> using their latin-1 equivalents, and vice versa.  But I think this
> doesn't work with other fonts.
> 
> Note that for Emacs, a Cyrillic character in GB2312 and a Cyrillic
> character in KOI-R (and so on) are all different characters, even
> though they might look the same.

Yes, I know about this incredible MULE design flaw.  Well, 10 years
ago the knowledge of internationalization issues was confined to giant
multinational corporations (like IBM); but 5 years ago, thanks to
emergence of Unicode, the understanding of the issues became much more
widespread.  It is a pity that RMS was so illiterate in this respect
that he accepted MULE into Emacs...

> I don't know how much of this will
> change in Emacs 22, but at the moment, that's the way it is.  And
> because Emacs considers them to be different characters, Emacs
> doesn't use glyphs for one character to display another.  And
> latin1-disp.el is the exception from that rule...

Note that your "because" is misplaced.  Even if buffer-filling engine
does not consider them the same, the display engine might have
remapped them for display purposes to the same codepoint in the same
font.

Ilya