The displaying of ISO-8859-15

The displaying of ISO-8859-15

[Steinar Bang]

Platform: Intel Pentium M, Ubuntu Dapper,
	  emacs21 21.4a-3ubuntu2,
	  No Gnus v0.6 (CVS update from May 1 2006)

The good people at Opera has at one point in time made the bad
decision of promoting ISO-8859-15 as the default charset in email and
news messages sent from the Opera browser (at least when running in a
Western European locale).

One annoying thing is that if this setting is changed to
eg. ISO-8859-1, the setting isn't preserved when Opera is upgraded.
And experience has shown that admonishing Opera users to change their
charset setting, can be tiring on both the admonisher and the
admonished...

So I figured out how to make Gnus cast replies and followups to
8859-15 messages into 8859-1 when responding, and was satisfied with
that. 

The main reason (apart from the purely aestethical dislike of
iso-8859-15 as a concept) for being annoyed with ISO-8859-15, is that
Gnus on my platform (see above) picked a bug-ugly font for those
characters.  I've filed that under "probably caused by the fonts
installed on my platform, and not something I'd spend time on".

But today I did `C-u g' in the summary buffer to see the headers of an
ISO-8859-15 message.  And down in the message body, the ISO-8859-15
characters were shown in the same font as the surrounding US-ASCII.
Ie. the same font ISO-8859-1 characters would have been shown in.

It then dawned on me that configuring the display of ISO-8859-15 in
messages is possibly something that Gnus can do.  Eg. decide to
display it like ISO-8859-1 or something (who needs that silly Euro
char anyways...?).

Does anyone know?

Thanx!


- Steinar

Re: The displaying of ISO-8859-15

[Reiner Steib]

On Thu, Dec 14 2006, Steinar Bang wrote:

> So I figured out how to make Gnus cast replies and followups to
> 8859-15 messages into 8859-1 when responding, and was satisfied with
> that. 

I guess you refer to `mm-coding-system-priorities', aren't you?

> The main reason (apart from the purely aestethical dislike of
> iso-8859-15 as a concept) for being annoyed with ISO-8859-15, is that
> Gnus on my platform (see above) picked a bug-ugly font for those
> characters.  I've filed that under "probably caused by the fonts
> installed on my platform, and not something I'd spend time on".

It might also be an Emacs configuration issue.  `C-u C-x =' will tell
you which font is used for -1 / and -15.  I'd suggest to load a file
with Scandinavian chars with "emacs -q -no-site-file" with both
charsets (`C-x C-m c iso-8859-... RET C-x C-f foo.txt RET').  Maybe
there's some error in your configuration.

> But today I did `C-u g' in the summary buffer to see the headers of an
> ISO-8859-15 message.  And down in the message body, the ISO-8859-15
> characters were shown in the same font as the surrounding US-ASCII.
> Ie. the same font ISO-8859-1 characters would have been shown in.
>
> It then dawned on me that configuring the display of ISO-8859-15 in
> messages is possibly something that Gnus can do.  

Well, Emacs can do something: `unify-8859-on-decoding-mode', but it
has some pitfalls.  If your Gnus is sufficiently recent, you might use
`mm-charset-override-alist'.  But I wouldn't recommend this unless
when using some old/non-MULE (X)Emacs which is not aware of Latin-9
(even then, `mm-charset-synonym-alist' would make more sense.)

,----[ <f1> v mm-charset-override-alist RET ]
| mm-charset-override-alist is a variable defined in `mm-util'.
| Its value is 
| ((iso-8859-1 . windows-1252)
|  (iso-8859-8 . windows-1255)
|  (iso-8859-9 . windows-1254))
| 
| Documentation:
| A mapping from undesired charset names to their replacement.
| 
| You may add pairs like (iso-8859-1 . windows-1252) here,
| i.e. treat iso-8859-1 as windows-1252.  windows-1252 is a
| superset of iso-8859-1.
| 
| You can customize this variable.
`----

> Eg. decide to display it like ISO-8859-1 or something (who needs
> that silly Euro char anyways...?).

Latin-1 and Latin-9 differ in 8 positions[1], not only the EUR char.

Bye, Reiner.

[1]
,----[ Latin-1 vs. Latin-9 ]
| -ISO_8859-1(7)       Linux Programmer's Manual       ISO_8859-1(7)
| +ISO_8859-15(7)      Linux Programmer's Manual      ISO_8859-15(7)
| -       244   164   A4     CURRENCY SIGN
| +       244   164   A4     EURO SIGN
| -       246   166   A6     BROKEN BAR
| +       246   166   A6     LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CARON
| -       250   168   A8     DIAERESIS
| +       250   168   A8     LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON
| -       264   180   B4     ACUTE ACCENT
| +       264   180   B4     LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH CARON
| -       270   184   B8     CEDILLA
| +       270   184   B8     LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH CARON
| -       274   188   BC     VULGAR FRACTION ONE QUARTER
| -       275   189   BD     VULGAR FRACTION ONE HALF
| -       276   190   BE     VULGAR FRACTION THREE QUARTERS
| +       274   188   BC     LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE OE
| +       275   189   BD     LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE
| +       276   190   BE     LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS
`----
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: The displaying of ISO-8859-15

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc>:

> On Thu, Dec 14 2006, Steinar Bang wrote:
>> So I figured out how to make Gnus cast replies and followups to
>> 8859-15 messages into 8859-1 when responding, and was satisfied with
>> that. 

> I guess you refer to `mm-coding-system-priorities', aren't you?

Not sure.  What I did was to put
 (charset . iso-8859-1)
in the group parameters.

mm-coding-system-priorities seems to be nil for me.  Is that better to
use? 

> It might also be an Emacs configuration issue.  `C-u C-x =' will tell
> you which font is used for -1 / and -15. 

  character: ø (04370, 2296, 0x8f8)
    charset: latin-iso8859-1
             (Right-Hand Part of Latin Alphabet 1 (ISO/IEC 8859-1): ISO-IR-100)
 code point: 120
     syntax: word
   category: l:Latin  
buffer code: 0x81 0xF8
  file code: 0x81 0xF8 (encoded by coding system raw-text-unix)
       font: -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO8859-1

  character: ø (07570, 3960, 0xf78)
    charset: latin-iso8859-15
             (Right-Hand Part of Latin Alphabet 9 (ISO/IEC 8859-15): ISO-IR-203)
 code point: 120
     syntax: word
   category: l:Latin  
buffer code: 0x8E 0xF8
  file code: 0x8E 0xF8 (encoded by coding system raw-text-unix)
       font: -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--6-60-75-75-C-40-ISO8859-15

(hm... what coding will this get on outgoing I wonder...?)

> I'd suggest to load a file with Scandinavian chars with "emacs -q
> -no-site-file" with both charsets (`C-x C-m c iso-8859-... RET C-x
> C-f foo.txt RET').  Maybe there's some error in your configuration.

I got the same ugly font for ISO-8859-15 as I'm getting in Gnus.  I've
got a 13k screen shot showing the two emacsen displaying the file in
the two fonts, for those that are interested.

> Well, Emacs can do something: `unify-8859-on-decoding-mode', but it
> has some pitfalls.  If your Gnus is sufficiently recent, you might
> use `mm-charset-override-alist'.  But I wouldn't recommend this
> unless when using some old/non-MULE (X)Emacs which is not aware of
> Latin-9 (even then, `mm-charset-synonym-alist' would make more
> sense.)

Ok, mm-charset-synonym-alist is something to look at then.  This is my
current setting:
((windows-1255 . iso-8859-8)
 (windows-1254 . iso-8859-9)
 (windows-1252 . iso-8859-1)
 (windows-1250)
 (big5-hkscs . big5)
 (unicode . utf-16-le)
 (ks_c_5601-1987 . euc-kr))

> Latin-1 and Latin-9 differ in 8 positions[1], not only the EUR char.

Ouch.  But none of those differences listed below will normally affect
Norwegian language email messages and news postings.

Thanx!

- Steinar

> [1]
> ,----[ Latin-1 vs. Latin-9 ]
>> -ISO_8859-1(7)       Linux Programmer's Manual       ISO_8859-1(7)
>> +ISO_8859-15(7)      Linux Programmer's Manual      ISO_8859-15(7)
>> -       244   164   A4     CURRENCY SIGN
>> +       244   164   A4     EURO SIGN
>> -       246   166   A6     BROKEN BAR
>> +       246   166   A6     LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CARON
>> -       250   168   A8     DIAERESIS
>> +       250   168   A8     LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON
>> -       264   180   B4     ACUTE ACCENT
>> +       264   180   B4     LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH CARON
>> -       270   184   B8     CEDILLA
>> +       270   184   B8     LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH CARON
>> -       274   188   BC     VULGAR FRACTION ONE QUARTER
>> -       275   189   BD     VULGAR FRACTION ONE HALF
>> -       276   190   BE     VULGAR FRACTION THREE QUARTERS
>> +       274   188   BC     LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE OE
>> +       275   189   BD     LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE
>> +       276   190   BE     LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS