Re: line drawing characters

[Greg Hill]

At 6:04 PM -0600 10/28/04, Kevin Rodgers wrote:
> Greg Hill wrote:
> >  I am using emacs (GNU Emacs 21.2.2 (sparc-sun-solaris2.7, X toolkit)) on
> >  a unix system under X.
>
> Not as good as Emacs 21.3 or 21.3.50 (CVS), but should be recent enuf.
>
> >  I would like to create some simple line drawings by mixing line-drawing
> >  characters along with ordinary text.  Surely the One True Editor is
> >  capable of that, but I haven't been able to glean any useful information
> >  on how to proceed from the Gnu Emacs Manual (Fifteenth Edition), the Gnu
> >  Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, or anything I could find doing a Goolge
> >  search.
>
> 1. These line drawing characters must belong to some character set
>    e.g. Unicode http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2500.pdf
>
> 2. Once you've identified the character set you want to use, you need to
>    figure out which Emacs coding system supports it.  Then you specify
>    that coding system with `C-x RET c' when you edit your buffer/file.
>
> 3. Finally, you'll need how to input those characters while you're
>    editing.  If your keyboard can enter them directly, `C-x RET k'
>    should handle it; but you may need to install LEIM and rebuild Emacs
>    and use `C-\'.

Thanks.  So far what I have is...

1.  It appears as if U2500-2575 contains the glyphs I am after.

2.  I switched to a computer that has emacs 21.3.1with leim support.

3.  The variable 'charset-list tells me that there is a character set 
named "mule-unicode-2500-33FF", which sounds like it's probably a 
pretty good bet.

4.  The function 'find-coding-system-for-charsets tells me there is a 
coding system named "emacs-mule" that can encode characters in both 
mule-unicode-2500-33FF and ascii.

5.  I can use `C-x RET c' to create a new file in a buffer using the 
emacs-mule coding system.

Now, what I can't figure out is:

a.  How do I find out what character codes correspond to which glyphs?

b.  How to I get those glyphs to actually appear on my screen?  I 
tried eval-ing the following fragment of code

(let ((ic 0))
  (while (< ic 10000)
    (if (char-valid-p ic)
        (insert-char ic 1))
    (setq ic (1+ ic))))

with my "emacs-mule" buffer as my current buffer, and all I get is 
regular ascii, a lot of glyphs I am not interested in, and a lot of 
empty boxes which are probably where the glyphs I am interested in 
should be.

Any more tips you can give me will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again.

--Greg