Re: Chinese characters support

[Lee Sau Dan]

>>>>> "Charles" == Charles Muller <acmuller@gol.com> writes:

    Charles> I know that, and I am not contesting that point. But
    Charles> again, the HELLO file is not a utf-8 file. 

I think you're being religious.  Why must it be utf-8?


    Charles> It is also not a form of JIS or other East Asian
    Charles> encoding,

It's  emacs-mule  encoding  ---   Emac's  own  representation  of  the
information about characters/encodings that it keeps.


    Charles>so the fact that one can display multilingual
    Charles> scripts by opening that file does not mean that they will
    Charles> be able to display them in Big5, JIS, or whatever.

If one can see  the Big5 text in that file, he  can see all other Big5
files.  If one  can see the Thai characters in that  file, he can also
see  the Thai  characters when  he  opens a  Thai text  file with  the
suitable     encoding    (the     default    if     he     has    done
set-language-environement correctly).  And so on.


    Charles> People who recommend checking this file are usually
    Charles> people who don't use double-byte East Asian languages.

Sorry, I  use Big5 very often.   And I do  recommend C-h h as  a quick
test to see if he has installed the big5 fonts correctly.  (Big5 fonts
do not come with XFree86, and many Linux distros has been ignoring the
"leim" and "intlfont" packages for years.)


    >> The file is in a relevant encoding: it's the encoding used by
    >> Emacs internally.  (Or rather, an encoding close to the
    >> internal encoding.)

    Charles> Relevant to whom?

To Emacs.


    Charles> It's not in utf-8, right?

So what?   My .signature is  in Big5 and  it is not in  utf-8, either.
And  my .emacs file  is in  emacs-mule encoding,  which is  not utf-8,
either.  Neither are utf-16 files utf-8.

I think  you're being religious  when you worship utf-8.   For Chinese
text, utf-8 wastes 50% of  storage space.  I'd rather use utf-16.  But
big5 has the  same storage efficiency (and more  when you include some
English text) and it is more common.



    Charles> No one that I know who works in XML or with East Asian
    Charles> international scripts works in utf-7,

And for XML in Chinese, utf-8  wastes lots of space.  To be practical,
we often use big5 for XML files with Chinese.


    Charles> so while that encoding format may be relevant for those
    Charles> who are programming Emacs internally, it is not relevant
    Charles> for anyone using Emacs to do multilingual XML or HTML
    Charles> publication, because no one uses it. That's what I mean
    Charles> when I say "not relevant."

My  experience with  Emac's utf-8  <--> internal  conversion  has been
good.



-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     李守敦(Big5)                    ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ) 

E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee