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Re: documentation bug: Mule and MSDOS


From: Francesco Potorti`
Subject: Re: documentation bug: Mule and MSDOS
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2001 18:08:42 +0200

Eli Zaretskii:
   > What I would consider usable and  simple would be being able to read the
   > file, then, if I see that it is not displayed in the correct way, having
   > a menu with  a lot of possible coding systems to  choose from, and being
   > able  to change  the display  of the  file's contents  until  one coding
   > system satisfies me.
   
   This is not simple: until the file is decoded, you have no real hope to 
   see it as anything but garbage (with the exception of pure ASCII), 
   because Emacs has no idea how to display the non-ASCII characters.

It is okay if Emacs reads the file trying to guess the coding system, as
it does now.  What  I miss is a very simple way  of changing that once I
see that  Emacs has not guessed right.   A menu would be  perfect, in my
opinion.
   
   > Having to choose the coding system  *before* reading the file in is very
   > unnatural to me.  Being unable to change it without closing the file and
   > rereading it is close to absurd.
   
   As I said earlier, with some encodings, decoding is a lossy operation.  
   So it is not always possible to avoid rereading the file, unless Emacs 
   stores the original file's contents in addition to the decoded one.
   
It's okay as long as the rereading opertaion is hidden.  This should
always be possible if the buffer has not been modified.
   
   Could you perhaps read the current pretest version of the manual and
   see if something still needs to be changed?

If I ever find the time to do that, I'll revise that part of the
manual. 



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