Re: New Mac OS Changes

[Andrew Choi]

> > [...] the character sets mac-roman-lower and mac-roman-upper not
> > being defined [...].  They are now defined in lisp/mule-conf.el.
> 
> What are these `character sets'? Would they be better implemented as
> coding-systems that map onto already existing character-sets like
> Latin-1 in the same way that the DOS and Windows codepages do?

The Mac Roman encoding is a distinct (i.e., non-standard) character
encoding used by Apple.  It includes characters from a number of
European languages and its own special symbols (e.g., the Apple logo,
the command key symbol, etc).  It does not seem to map one-to-one to
any of the existing character sets (unlike the DOS codepages).

A coding system called mac-roman is indeed defined in mac-win.el which
uses these character sets (mac-roman-lower and mac-roman-upper).  It
is used to display Mac files in their native encoding and for
displaying file names, for example.

Conceivably we can make this coding system available on other
platforms if fonts for such an encoding are created for them and there
is ever a need to edit Mac Roman files there.  But then we can always
use recode (and perhaps lose a few characters).

Andrew.