Re: auto-recognize utf-8 encoded files upon visiting: solved (sort of...)

[Charles Muller]

Gerald wrote:

> Charles, thanks for your hint on TEI; I gave TEI a long try many years ago,
> when SGML came up, they provided very good introductory material to the
> whole issue. But I didn't know of their work on emacs. You say that the
> unicode stuff didn't work right on emacs 21.2.

It worked OK for me for European languages, and I can do CJK input/output in
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, either in the national encodings or in utf-8. But
regular Emacs 21.2, although it seems to be able to recognize the encodings
of files, does not seem to be able to apply the proper fonts very
well--especially East Asian fonts, when they are mixed in together with Latin.

> I compiled an emacs version
> from the CVS sources (http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs/) and there
> unicode integration seems to be already more evolved than in the official
> distribution. Almost everything works very well. Perhaps you should give it
> a try.

 TEI-Emacs applies a "fontifying" process wherein the proper fonts are
 applied to all of the different mixed-language codepoints that I am
 using. I wonder if this recent package you mention can do that?

In any case, what you have told me here is certainly good news, and I'll
keep it in mind. As you have guessed, I do not use Emacs for programming,
but as an infinitely customizable text-editing environment to carry out
humanities research projects. 

The main reason I use TEI-Emacs is not for the Unicode handling, but because I
am running a number of research projects that are structured by TEI-XML. I'm
using their DTD's, style sheets, and everything, so it's a complete package
for me, that takes care of almost everything.

Nonetheless, like you, I'm looking forward to the continued development of the
Emacsens toward Unicode. I know that Xemacs 21.5 will set UTF-8 as the
default encoding. I hope the developers at GNU Emacs have similar intentions
in mind.

Regards,

Chuck
 
---------------------------
Charles Muller  <acmuller@gol.com>
Faculty of Humanities,  Toyo Gakuen University
Digital Dictionary of Buddhism and CJKV-English Dictionary 
[http://www.acmuller.net]
Mobile Phone: 090-9310-1787