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Re: fontsets/charsets documentation suggestion


From: Eric Abrahamsen
Subject: Re: fontsets/charsets documentation suggestion
Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2009 15:14:54 -0700


On Jul 4, 2009, at 1:07 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

Cc: address@hidden
From: Eric Abrahamsen <address@hidden>
Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 18:40:56 -0700

This is in the manual, see the node "Character Sets" and maybe the
other nodes from its parent "Non-ASCII Characters", if you need more
background.

If something is missing or unclear, please post more specific gripes.

Hmm, I wonder if this is part of the problem. Section 26 of my Emacs
Info file is 'International Character Set Support', and everything
relevant seems to be under this heading. I don't see a 'Character
Sets' or a 'Non-ASCII Characters' node. There's no index entry for
'registry', neither does a grep of the info files for 'registry'
produce any definition of the word as related to fonts. Am I looking
in the wrong place? (I'm using a CVS build on Mac OSX, the ns
Emacs.app version.)

I meant the Emacs Lisp manual, not the User manual.  Sorry, I should
have made that clear, but for some reason (perhaps because you
mentioned create-fontset-from-fontset-spec) I thought you were already
looking there, and that you need this information for writing Lisp
code.

Good lord yes, that makes much more sense. I'm approaching this purely as a user trying to define a multi-lingual environment, not an Elisp coder, and some of the Elisp manual stuff is necessary to make that work.


The existing examples would be clear if I'd gone into it actually
understanding the difference between a charset, a script and a
registry, and knowing which variables contained the possible values
for each of these three concepts. My particular use-case was defining
specific fonts for English/Latin, Chinese and Thai, and I did not
understand where 'han' came from, and its relationship to 'chinese-
gb2312' (I have since been directed to charset-script-alist). If I'm
actually missing a chunk of the documentation this would be better.

There aren't any examples of using create-fontset-from-fontset-spec,
and it would be nice to see one or two. The documentation for the
function is technically correct, I'm sure, but is the kind of
documentation that's only useful if you already understand how it
works. Neither 26.15 Defining Fontsets nor the documentation say how
you actually employ a fontset once you've made it. This has got to be
one of the most complex areas of Emacs customization, and it would be
nice to err on the side of too much hand-holding.

I agree that the description of fontsets in the User manual is barely
minimal, especially if the user (a) needs to create complex fontsets
dealing with several different character sets, and (b) does not
already know quite a lot about character sets.  The problem is that
most people who work on the manual know very little about subtleties
and intricacies of fontsets, and it clearly shows in the quality of
that section.

I wonder if the stuff in the ELisp manual helps in any way.  If it
does, we could copy some of it, with suitable editing, into the User
manual.

I think that's exactly what should be done. Emacs 23 is far better at providing multilingual support, which means more and more users are going to want to do it, and they're going to need more help.

So maybe a step-by-step tutorial with the following:

1. A really quick version of 33.1 Text Representations
2. How to find what fonts are on your machine and available to Emacs (with system-dependent variations). 3. The difference between charset, registry and script, and the relevant functions and variables.
4. How to read a font string.
5. What a fontset is, and what it looks like in its various guises.
6. How to find currently defined fontsets (ie list-fontsets), and how they relate to each other (I've got fontset-default, fontset-standard, and fontset-startup and I have no idea which of those I should be working with). 7. How to use set-fontset-font and create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to create and modify fontsets. Describe the argument variations within the manual, not just in the function docs. 8. How to examine existing characters in buffers (ie C-u C-x =), and to use that information to inform your usage of the above two functions.

I'd be happy to assist in whatever way possible – I could suggest more additions to the manual or read through new docs (I'm an editor, among other things). I know squat about fontsets, obviously, but maybe that could be useful.

Thanks for your responses on this!

Eric





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