Re: bbdb and searching

[Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann)]

remi.letot@easynet.be (Rémi Letot) writes:

> Now I don't understand the bits about 'using the X11 compose key
> (<compose> " a)'. Could you be more specific ? And is there a generic
> way to solve this problem ?

One of the keys on my kbd generates the Multi_key keysym.  I'm used
to calling this the Compose key, because that's what's printed on it
on a Sun keyboard.  X11R6 provides a general mechanism for typing
nonascii characters via the Multi_key.  You type the Multi_key, then
a sequence of other keys, and the application sees some nonascii
character.  For example, the Multi_key followed by " followed by a
inserts the ä character in my programs.

Some time ago, I was running in a Latin-1 environment, so the above
key sequence produced ä in Latin-1 encoding.  Now I switched to
LC_CTYPE=de_DE@euro, so Emacs uses a Latin-9 environment, and hence
the same key sequence produces ä in Latin-9 encoding.

But actually it does not matter how the characters get into Emacs.
If you have the following line:

    bäh bäh

and the two ä come from different charsets, then C-s C-w C-s when at
the beginning of the above line does NOT find the second word.  Of
course, users would like C-s C-w C-s to find the second word.

In Emacs from CVS, you can turn on unify-8859-on-decoding-mode and
this will help somewhat because it reduces the number of times that ä
from different charsets appears in your file.  (But it is also bad for
editing the file lisp/ChangeLog that comes with Emacs because it
changes the encoding of Pavel Janík's name -- the í should be from
Latin-2 but is reencoded into Latin-1 by unify-8859-on-decoding-mode.
Probably this special case is not very important for you.)

Work is currently in progress to change the internal encoding of
Emacs from Mule to something based on Unicode (ie, Unicode with some
extensions).  When this happens, all ä characters will be the same
inside of Emacs.  Then the searching problem will be gone.  (It also
means that Pavel's name will be affected, one way or another.)

kai
-- 
Silence is foo!