Re: unicode in emacs 21

[Dave Love]

>>>>> "OD" == Oliver Doepner <oldo@CoLi.Uni-SB.DE> writes:

 OD> There is vim 6.x now with full utf-8 support on the xterm.

[Does `full utf-8 support' mean level 3?]

Emacs can do utf-8 i/o under ttys that support it, though you don't
_need_ such support -- either input or output -- to edit utf-8 text.

 OD> It is much faster than emacs on x11 of course.

I'm surprised that's much of an issue.  I assume Emacs under X is much
more capable.

 OD> I was happy to see Emacs 21 announced. but the unicode support
 OD> does not seem to have moved forward very much

It's moved from zero to the state where it's perfectly fine for
editing at least the Western technical text that interests me.  E.g.,
Kuhn's UTF-8-demo.utf works modulo the level 2 text, for which one can
add support straightforwardly at the Lisp level.  It also allowed
producing coding systems for all the 8-bit charsets for GNUish
locales, which perhaps matters more in the wide world than utf-8 per
se.  With some customization, I can also at least _display_
utf-8-encoded CJK text.  I can send and receive utf-8-encoded mail and
browse utf-8-encoded web sites (with the development W3 package).

The Mule-UCS package provides more if necessary, specifically better
coverage of the BMP.

 OD> Is the internal representation still the special MULE format ??~

Yes.  So what?  [There has been much mis-representation of Mule, some
of it malicious.]  There is a yet-unimplemented scheme for coverage up
to U+10FFFF within that encoding.  Even now, with Lisp-level changes
one could build an (incompatible) Emacs to cover the BMP, sacrificing
some of the standard charsets.

-- 
Bragging about Unicode support: ‘2d sinθ = nλ’ is plain text. ☺
<URL:http://www.unicode.org/>