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Re: Emacspeak and UTF-8 -- possible?


From: Stefan Monnier
Subject: Re: Emacspeak and UTF-8 -- possible?
Date: Thu, 09 Aug 2007 13:44:41 -0400
User-agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.1.50 (gnu/linux)

>>> Emacspeak AFAIK doesn't support multi-byte characters.  The problem is
>>> that many speech synthesises, particularly older hardware based ones like
>>> the dectalk, don't understand UTF-8 character sets.  If you send them
>>> a multibyte character, they either lock up, speak garbage or do something
>>> else unexpected.
>> 
>> That's not a good reason to prevent display of any other char.

> Does any other char mean UTF-8?  If this is the case, wouldn't you agree
> that it is better to not have UTF-8 support than to not be able to use
> the computer because your speech synth locks up unexpectedly and often?

No, I'm saying that the place where they placed the check to filter out
unwanted chars is wrong.  They should have Emacs accept any random encoding
as always, and then encode/filter the text they send to the
underlying process.

Emacs constantly encodes decodes text between different encodings.  E.g. If
you visit a latin-1 file, it gets decoded into Emacs's internal
representation, and when you save it, it gets re-encoded into latin-1
(unless you've decided to change the file's encoding in which case it may
be reencoded in any other coding-system).

So if the speech process only understands latin-1, they should simply set
the coding-system used for that process accordingly and everything should
just work.  They may encounter difficulties finding the proper coding-system
that handles unencodable chars (e.g. cyrillic chars with
a latin-1 coding-system) in the way they want (e.g. drop the char
altogether or replace it with a "?" or some other special char), but people
on emacs-devel@gnu.org will be happy to help resolve those.


        Stefan


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