any news for full UTF8 support in 21.5.x

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an dara lá de mí Meitheamh, scríobh Stephen J. Turnbull: 

 >     Uwe> Around January, I think Stephen T. said, that full UFT8
 >     Uwe> support would enter the 21.5.x series in a couple of month.
 > 
 > Depends on what you mean by "full UTF-8" support.  Aidan just
 > committed a patch that allows XEmacs to not corrupt unknown Unicode
 > characters.  

Not yet committed. I had a minor hardware issue--more exactly, I spilled a
glass of wine on my laptop, oops--and a new job to finalise this week. It
should be in place by Sunday, though.

 > I'm not sure how keyboard input and display are
 > supported for such characters, though.

On my machine, I set the primary font I want to see using X resources, and
use this in my ~/.xemacs/init.el to get them displaying okay;

;; With the current font architecture, this gets picked up as the face for
;; the esoteric character sets, and the X11 resources are checked for the
;; others.
(set-face-font 'default 
               "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1")

Which is a bit hackish. But then the current Mule handling of X11
server-side fonts doesn’t offer an alternative to hacking around.

I also have this, which is a huge improvement on the previous situation for
those out there who don’t have the specialised Mule fonts installed (that
is, for almost everyone using X11): 

(dolist (charset 
       '(chinese-cns11643-1 chinese-cns11643-2 chinese-big5-1
         chinese-big5-2 arabic-digit arabic-1-column arabic-2-column
         chinese-sisheng ascii-right-to-left indian-is13194 lao ipa
         vietnamese-viscii-upper vietnamese-viscii-lower japanese-jisx0212
         chinese-cns11643-3 chinese-cns11643-4 chinese-cns11643-5
         chinese-cns11643-6 chinese-cns11643-7 chinese-isoir165 ethiopic
         indian-2-column indian-1-column japanese-jisx0213-1
         japanese-jisx0213-2 thai-xtis tibetan tibetan-1-column))
(when (equal (charset-dimension charset) 2)
  (set-charset-ccl-program charset 'ccl-encode-to-ucs-2)
  (set-charset-registry charset "iso10646-1")))))

I’m thinking about keeping around a list of the XLFDs for Markus Kuhn’s
reasonably complete iso10646-1 fonts, and in the font lookup code, for _all_
charsets, checking for them and changing the corresponding registry and
ccl-program if they exist, before falling back to drawing tildes. Since most
of the extant XFree86 and X.org installs have these fonts, that would be a
noticeable improvement for lots of people. 

-- 
Aidan Kehoe, http://www.parhasard.net/