Re: Problem of auto-fill-mode for wide character

[Herbert Euler]

> From: Kenichi Handa <address@hidden>
> To: "Herbert Euler" <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Problem of auto-fill-mode for wide character
> Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 16:46:27 +0900
>
> Thank you for reminding of this unsolved problem.  The
> reason why Chinese characters invoke auto-fill is that they
> are not yet registered in the char-table auto-fill-chars.
> And why I have not yet done in Unicode 2 branch is that I
> don't know any "authorized" information about that.
>
> I've just registered these apparent characters:
>   U+3041..U+30FF, U+3400..U+4DB5, U+4e00..U+9fbb, U+F900..U+FAFF,
>   U+FF00..U+FF9F, U+20000..U+2FFFF
> So, now auto-fill should work for most Han characters.
>
> But, there are many more questionable characters, for instance:
>   U+3000..U+303F, U+3200..U+33FF, ...

In my opinion, this solution is not an applicable one. Trying to register
most characters in Chinese, Japanese and Korean as auto-fill-chars would
waste lots of memory, and perhaps some characters would be forgot
to be registered. For example, in Japanese, Hiragana and Katakana
probably work, but not for most Kanji. Besides, the policy for filling
punctuations in English and in Chinese is different: usually, if a 
punctuation
appears to be the last character of a line but exceeds the fill-column,
it will be extended to the next line with the word it follows in English,
but left there (and following characters will be moved to the next
line) in Chinese. I don't know whether this is supported by registering
auto-fill-chars.

> Do you have some idea about exactly which set of characters
> to register in auto-fill-chars?

I don't know the detail of how Emacs distincts auto-fill between languages
in which words are separated by blanks and those not; but if the orignal
design of auto-fill ignored situations in the latter ones, one possible 
better
solution seems to be modifying the mechanism of auto-fill to make it support
the different concepts of auto-fill in such languages.

If the words in a language are not separated by blanks, then all characters
except punctuations should be moved to the next line, assuming that it
exceeds the fill-column. For some punctuations, if it appears to exceed the
fill-column, it should be left there. For others, just deal with them like 
for
characters.

Regards,
Guanpeng Xu

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