Re: per-buffer language environments

[Werner LEMBERG]

> *His* problems are harder, and more deeply tied to language itself.
> The current language environment mechanism is good at what it does
> and will be somewhat improved by being made buffer-local, but to be
> really useful to Werner a number of additional attributes need to be
> added, as well as some functionality that I don't yet really know
> how to implement (eg, his Romanian s-with-comma-below vs. s-cedilla
> issue).

IMHO, the Romanian functionality is nothing Emacs should take care at
all.  It should simply forward a `language environment' to the font
library which has to take care of using the proper glyph.  Today, most
of the good multilingual OpenType fonts have support for that
mechanism.  However, for CJK stuff, the situation is very different.
Virtually *no* font supports different glyphs for Chinese, Japanese,
and Korean.  Ken Lunde from Adobe has analyzed the problem in detail,
and according to him, it would be necessary to add about 40% more
glyphs, making huge fonts even larger.


    Werner