[mule] xemacs doesn't recognize some symbols

[stephen at xemacs.org]

Andriy Gapon writes:

 > On the other hand I can not enter some other quite basic symbols, xemacs
 > messages follow:

 > leftdoublequotemark not defined.
 > rightdoublequotemark not defined.
 > endash not defined.
 > Sh-emdash not defined.
 > Ukrainian_ghe_with_upturn not defined.
 > Macedonia_gje not defined.

Basic they may be, but historically they are relatively recent
additions.  (Not to mention that due to Soviet political pressure on
the ISO, Ukrainian and Macedonian characters were deliberately
excluded from even Unicode for many years.)  What happened is that as
the ISO defined more and more symbols and character sets the symbol
names were added to X11.  With the diffusion of Unicode this process
got disrailed in favor of adding characters to Unicode, but XEmacs
21.4 still depends on those "legacy" character sets.

It's quite possible that if you simply upgrade to XEmacs 21.5 things
will "just work", as XEmacs 21.5 has substantially better support for
Unicode.  This support will not be backported to XEmacs 21.4.

 > Where do these messages come from and what do they mean ?

They come from XEmacs.  They mean that the numerical equivalents (used
to index fonts) of the character names were not compiled into XEmacs,
so XEmacs cannot convert them into internal character codes.

 > Is this something wrong with the font I use ?

No.  See below.

 > On the other hand, if open a document that already contains the
 > troublesome symbols they are rendered as they should be. It seems that
 > the problem is with input.

That's right.  The documents contain the symbols coded as numerical
equivalents already.  These get passed more or less directly to the
rendering mechanism so there is no trouble.  For internal editing
purposes (deleting and moving), characters are just numbers, so
there's no problem there, either.

It's possible that Aidan Kehoe will be able to help you limp along
with 21.4, but in the medium term you need to upgrade to 21.5 if you
want to use Unicode (and I would guess you have little choice).