Re: mule doesn't like languages different from english

Please direct questions about Mule to xemacs-beta.  This list is
hardly ever used anymore; Mule is now mainstream, although not yet the
default configuration.

>>>>> "Tam=E1s" =3D=3D Tam=E1s H=E9ri <[email protected]> writes:

    Tam=E1s> Ok,ok I know that this is the effect of the actual coding
    Tam=E1s> system, which is tried to be "intelligently" chosen by
    Tam=E1s> xemacs.

There is no automatic way (short of artificial intelligence) to choose
among ISO-8859 coding systems.  We could do a little bit better in
some cases, but not enough to make the effort worth it.  Sorry.  Your
options:

1.  Use Unicode (eg, UTF-8).  Support in XEmacs 21.4 is questionable,
unfortunately.  In the development series, XEmacs 21.5.18 is quite
stable and has good Unicode support, but also has other flaws.  "Your
mileage may vary", but I haven't used anything but 21.5 for over a
year now.

2.  Invoke XEmacs as LANG=3Dhu_HU.ISO8859-2 (or whatever the correct
locale is).  This will set the internal language environment to
Hungarian and the default 8-bit coding system to ISO-8859-2 instead of
ISO-8859-1.  This may cause problems with programs (like ls and
ispell) that XEmacs runs.

3.  Invoke (set-language-environment "Hungarian") in your init file.

4.  Use M-x set-buffer-file-coding-system RET ISO-8859-2 RET.  (More
likely, you will use 1, 2, or 3, and use that command to set the rare
file that needs to be ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15 or something.)

    Tam=E1s> So, I'm a little bit lost with mule; I do not really know
    Tam=E1s> that it could ever be useful to anyone using different
    Tam=E1s> language than english; but why does it exist then?!

First, it works fine with Japanese (after all, it was written by
Japanese).  The reason it doesn't work with non-Western-European
languages is that ever since the introduction of Mule, non-WEL
speakers have preferred to use "xemacs -font '-*-iso8859-2'" rather
than help fix the bugs in Mule initialization for their locale.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course.  People _should_ use what
works for important work.  But it's very difficult for me to even
_see_ ISO-8859-2 bugs because the only app I had that can deal with
that is Mule, and it very happily does the right thing with the escape
sequences!  So relatively easy bugs persist for years and years.

--=20
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.=
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University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 =
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