Re: per-buffer language environments

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> According to the documentation, set-language-environent acts
>> globally.  However, at least for CJK documents, it would be very
>> helpful if this could be controlled on a per-buffer basis[1].  For
>> example, on my GNU/Linux box with latin-1 as the default langauge
>> environment, while editing some Japanese text, I see the katakana
>> glyphs from the `simsun' font which look particularly ugly.
>> Assuming that I edit a Chinese text in parallel, a Japanese font
>> from a Japanese language environment would miss most of the Chinese
>> characters, causing fallback character substitution which looks
>> ugly again...
> 
> But font selection is just one part of the language environment.  Are
> there any other aspects of the language environment that would make
> sense to have on per-buffer basis?

For CJK language environments, I'm not aware of other aspects, but
probably Ken'ichi-san knows more.

> If font selection is the only part, then doesn't the fontset
> definition feature (see "(emacs)Defining Fontsets") do what you
> want?

If you tell me how to do that, this would be fine.  Note that the
`CHARSET:FONT' feature within a fontset is not appropriate since it
helps only if there are different charsets.  However, in the discussed
problem all buffer encodings are using Unicode.

On the other hand, I think it is not the right solution to specify a
fontset as a file variable.  I really want to say that file `foo'
contains Chinese; Emacs parses this information somehow and then
forwards this information to the font selection engine.


    Werner