Re: additional improvement of Polish tutorial

[Ryszard Kubiak]

Dear Richard,

>  Does it promote use of non-free software? 

The link http://www.agh.edu.pl/ogonki refers to a collection of pages
where people may learn how to solve problems with Polish national
characters in various pieces of software. After thinking on the idea,
and checking the contents of those pages I admit that the link should 
be removed from the Polish translation of the tutorial due to the legal 
problem you mantion.

The idea behind placing the link was that in our translation we use 
Polish national characters. Emacs beginners will probably not see
them when they read the tutorial in a freshly installed Emacs. It will
be so since there are lots of Emacs parameters to be configurated for 
the accented characters to work properly.

I think that Emacs on-line documentation lacks material on solving the
most basic problems with manipulating text files in Emacs: such as
inputing national characters, getting them on the screen and on paper.
The file Emacs Known Problems is more about Emacs problems with itself,
very exotic at places, than on solving those basic problems in Emacs.

Just to give you an example of such a problem. At work, I've been using
Emacs for many years now and, in particular, ntEmacs on Windows for a
couple of years. For all this time with ntEmacs, I have not managed to
print a text in Polish with lpr-buffer properly! None of all other text
editors we exploit on Windows has problems with simply sending a text
file to a printer. The Polish characters look on paper just as they
should. Only when printed by Emacs they don't!

I spent yet another two hours today on surfing the Internet, ntEmacs
on-line documentation and various FAQs, in hope that somebody has solved
the problem. Yet again, I made many experiments with plethora of MULE
parameters. With no success. I don't know if there is something wrong
with ntEmacs software, or, my configuration of MULE parameters is 
wrong.

I believe that Emacs begginers should be referred as soon as in the
tutorial to a place where they can learn on how to solve the common
problems with national characters. The Emacs Known Problems file,
however, is not the right reference. I second Junusz Bien's concept 
that Emacs distribution should contain PROBLEM files dedicated to
solving problems in various countries.

Best Regards,
Rysiek