Re: MULE primer

[SL Baur <steve@xemacs.org>]

[cc'ed to xemacs-mule]
Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes in ding@gnus.org:

> What is *the* way to learn about all this MULE stuff?

For detailed technical documentation about charsets, JIS, etc. there's 
the O'Reilly Blowfish book -- Understanding Japanese Information
Processing.  It makes very dry reading except perhaps for Chapter 5 -- 
"Japanese Input" which does give some clues how to make things work.

Unfortunately, unless you can read Japanese there doesn't appear to be 
any documentation.  I learned how to get around by trying things out
and asking questions.  It also helped that I had to build and install
the required extra packages -- I have Canna, Wnn4.2, Wnn6 (courtesy of 
OMRON), SJ3, and Kinput2 (an XIM server that simultaneously can
connect to all of the above backends) installed on my development
machine.  They all work slightly differently, of course. :-P

English documentation for XEmacs is/was being worked on, but the
person who was doing it got as far as a very close draft then dropped
away :-(.

A cheap pocket tourist's dictionary is good enough to get some examples
to type in.

> I have a distinct feeling I must be misunderstanding something basic
> here.  I mean, here's (日本語) some Japanese text, so I must be
> doing something right, but I still don't understand it.

I'm not sure where to begin.  Assuming some basic knowledge of
Japanese ...

For example, the word 日本語 can be represented three different ways.
日本語 is the Kanji form and what you will see in writing.  It can
represented phonetically in hiragana as にほんご.  That's actually
what I see first entering the word in canna (C-\ japanese-canna).
Hiragana is a phonetic alphabet, so what you see is what you type to
get it, in this case `nihongo'.