Re: More charset things

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Lars" == Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
    Lars> Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:

    >> MULE is little else than a Japanese version of Emacs, and it
    >> appears that the Japanese are not interested in Unicode.  So it

The MULE development group is nearly entirely Japanese; including the
people implementing Devanagari (for sure) and Arabic and Ethiopic
(IIRC).  Not surprisingly, the tuning (and tuning is absolutely
necessary; the linguists don't know enough about language for charset
guessing and the like to be more than heuristic) is best for Japanese,
and bugs for non-Japanese languages don't get found and fixed quickly.

But MULE is the only truly multilingual platform there is at the
moment, to the best of my knowledge; Unicode doesn't satisfy the needs 
of lots of people, and is not easily extensible without changing the
standard.  MULE is.  MULE is more than a Japanese version of Emacs.

The Japanese are divided on Unicode; some are vehemently opposed,
others are interested.  There don't seem to be any strong advocates,
though.

    >> wasn't implemented.  I'm not sure about FSF, but for XEmacs, I
    >> know of no plans to implement it in the near future.

    Lars> A partial implementation of utf-mumble was posted recently
    Lars> somewhere by someone.  (Could I possible get any more
    Lars> vague?)  So I'm Cc'ing this to the xemacs-mule list.

Morioka-san ported (IIRC) a Lisp-level implementation of UTF-8.  The
attachments were broken on the ML (so Steve never was able to look at
it), I'll restore from archive the working (I hope) copy I got from
Morioka.  Martin Buchholz believes that since the tables are in Lisp,
the performance impact will be huge.

    Lars> I asked before for a likely book that would introduce me to
    Lars> the basic concepts, and someone (Stephen Turnbull?) told me,
    Lars> but then I forgot.

Prices are vague recollections, in decreasing order of importance for
basic understanding:

Ken Lunde.  Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese Information
    Processing.  O'Reilly Associates.  Probably the most useful single 
    volume, although it doesn't cover single-octet encodings.
ISO.  ISO-2022:  Extension Techniques for Coded Character Sets.  US$75.
Unicode Consortium.  The Unicode Standard, v2.x.  About US$70 from Amazon.
ISO.  ISO-10646:  Universal Multi-octet Character Set Encoding
    Standard.  About US$125.  Don't bother unless you've got extra
    money, Unicode Standard is much more complete and readable.  All
    ISO-10646 has extra is 4-octet encoding, which is presently
    useless, and it is very likely that any UTF-8 .

I don't know of any textbooks on character set stuff, there must be
some somewhere.  Lunde's book will have a very extensive bibliography.

-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
What are those two straight lines for?  "Free software rules."