Status of XEmacs' (21.5) UTF-8 capabilities

[Reiner Steib <4.uce.03.r.s@nurfuerspam.de>]

Hi,

users in the German Gnus newsgroup are asking from time to time if
Gnus (5.10) is able to handle UTF-8 articles.  "handle" includes
reading and posting, i.e. followup to utf-8 articles.

While GNU Emacs 21.3 (latest stable release) can handle at least the
"Western European" part (Latin1, windows-1252) quite well, it seems
that XEmacs 21.5 produces multipart/mixed posting (where some
characters are incorrect [1]) or "windows-1252 labeled as Latin-1" (b)
instead of utf-8.  See the followups to my test articles in
<news:gmane.test> (<URL:http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.test/586>):

(a) <news://news.gmane.org/utf-8-demo.fsf@marauder.physik.uni-ulm.de>
    Markus Kuhn's utf-8 demo file

    XEmacs produces multipart/mixed with 726 (sic!) parts here!
    (a1) <news:85ptdweo5q.fsf@lorch-net.stlo.de>
    
(b) <news://news.gmane.org/windows-1252-cs-w1252@marauder.physik.uni-ulm.de>
    Latin-1 and windows-1252 w/ charset=windows-1252

    XEmacs produces "windows-1252 labeled as Latin-1"
    (b1) <news:85y8skeo7w.fsf_-_@lorch-net.stlo.de>

(c) <news://news.gmane.org/windows-1252-cs-utf-8@marauder.physik.uni-ulm.de>
    Latin-1 and windows-1252 w/ charset=utf-8

    XEmacs produces multipart/mixed with 29 parts.
    (c1) <news:85u138eo6x.fsf_-_@lorch-net.stlo.de>

(d) <news://news.gmane.org/latin-1-plus-1-cs-utf-8@marauder.physik.uni-ulm.de>
    Latin-1 and some windows-1252 chars w/ charset=utf-8

    XEmacs produces multipart/mixed with 20 parts.
    (d1) private mail from Steffen.

Is Steffen Lorch's (he did the tests with XEmacs) and my assumption
correct, that (Gnus with) XEmacs cannot post UTF-8 articles?  If not,
could you followup to the abovementioned articles in <news:gmane.test>
(with a full-quote of my text!) to prove me wrong and give the XEmacs
Users some instructions for their setup?

(IIRC, Steffen already has the latin-unity package installed.)

Bye, Reiner.

[1] <news:85u138eo6x.fsf_-_@lorch-net.stlo.de>

;; 82 = U+201A : SINGLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
;; 83 = U+0192 : LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH HOOK
;; 84 = U+201E : DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
;; 88 = U+02C6 : MODIFIER LETTER CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT
;; 8B = U+2039 : SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
(;; 96 = U+2013 : EN DASH ?)
(;; 97 = U+2014 : EM DASH ?)
;; 98 = U+02DC : SMALL TILDE
;; 9B = U+203A : SINGLE RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK

(and maybe others)
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/