Re: Unicode support

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > I think the latter doesn't have to change radically for Unicode.  As
> > for the former, those functions and macros are not specific to the
> > display engine, and need to be rewritten for Unicode anyway.
> 
> What you are talking about is Unicode level 1.

Yes.

> But to properly
> support Indic languages more things have to be done.  Even simple
> combining characters will have to be represented differently, AFAIK.

That's true, but this needs to be done anyway.  Bidirectional editing, 
Arabic presentation forms, newline functions, support for equivalent 
characters during searching--all these and much more need to be 
supported, and many of those will need modifications to the display 
engine.  Some of these features are even orthogonal to Unicode and could 
be implemented with the current character representation.

But without Unicode level 1, we can never have higher levels, right?

My point was that work on level 1 can begin without waiting for Emacs 21.