Re: Question on Mule and Makor2, font display vs char input?

[Joe Corneli]

   >    There is a LaTeX font environment called makor2 which allows a user to
   >    create output  using Hebrew  characters.  These output  characters are
   >    often defined by multi-byte combinations.   So it would be nice to have
   >    an Emacs  mode which allowed a user  at the keyboard to  type a single
   >    input  key and have  that keystroke  display the  proper corresponding
   >    Hebrew  character  on the  screen  while  placing  the proper  set  of
   >    matching  characters into  the  file  for LaTeX  Makor2.   There is  a
   >    standard keyboard setup use in Israel  which can be followed and a set
   >    of Mule Hebrew screen fonts seem to be readily available.

   There are several issues here:
   1 - what encoding can be used by makor2 in the TeX files: for hebrew
       characters, Emacs-21.3 supports ISO-8859-8 but not utf-8.
       If Makor2 requires utf-8, you'll need to use Emacs-CVS.
   2 - right-to-left text: this is not supported yet.
   3 - typing in Hebrew characters: you need to select an input method
       (with C-u C-\).  There's one called `hebrew'.

I think the way the encoding issue is supposed to be solved here is
for the file not to be utf-8, but instead just plain-text-unix, and
the buffer was made to look like it was in utf-8.  If I understand
X-Symbol right, Hebrew characters would be handled the same way as
math characters are handled by X-Symbol...

   > Any advice on how to make a string already entered into the buffer
   > render according to the current input method?  For example, a function
   > I could run that would make the string in quotes "\lambda" appear as a
   > lambda character in quotes.  Preferably this would be a function that
   > would run on a string and then use an overlay to change the way the
   > text looks and "feels" when you're editing (but when you save the
   > buffer, it would save as latex code, by default).

   There's X-Symbol which does just that (tho in a different way).

But I ran into trouble trying to build X-Symbol; it seems to have been
written with XEmacs in mind.  So it occured to me that maybe there was
a relatively straightforward way to do the same thing using quail.  I
guess I could have investigated the X-Symbol code better to see how it
is supposed to work.

   > Another function would run over the whole buffer, doing the quail
   > translations as it went.

   I don't know of any function that takes chars from a buffer and runs them
   through quail.  Quail is designed to take input from the keyboard, not from
   a buffer.

Well I hope it isn't too hard to write a function that translates a
string into a keysequence.  Is there an `insert-char' variant that
causes emacs to think that the character was typed by a human user
instead of inserted by a program?  If I'm using the TeX input mode,
(insert-char 92 1) just inserts a `\', but doesn't activate the quail
subsystem.