Re: character sets as they relate to “Raw” string literals for elisp

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Eli.

On Fri, Oct 08, 2021 at 09:53:54 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> > Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2021 20:37:19 -0400
> > Cc: rms@gnu.org, db48x@db48x.net, yuri.v.khan@gmail.com, 
> > emacs-devel@gnu.org, 
> >     monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, juri@linkov.net

[ .... ]

> I'd rather not start another discussion of this [How to display em dash
> in info], as opinions tend to be polarized about it, and IME nothing
> can bridge over the differences of opinions in this matter.  So I
> prefer a different way of handling this, see below.

> > I would hope that we could agree that how em dash is displayed is
> > not necessarily strictly connected to "@documentencoding UTF-8"; and
> > that it would be useful to continue using UTF-8 encoding, but also get
> > the "old" way of displaying em dash.

> Many people want to use and see Unicode punctuation characters in
> human-readable text.

That's a deliciously ambiguous sentence, with two opposite meanings.  :-)

I belong to the group of people who would rather see Unicode punctuation
rendered in human-readable (i.e. ASCII) text.

[ .... ]

> So I'd prefer to deal with this differently: introduce a new
> (buffer-local) minor mode, which will install a display-table, whereby
> "problematic" Unicode characters will be displayed as their ASCII
> equivalents or equivalent ASCII strings.  We already set that up
> automatically on terminals that are incapable of displaying those
> characters, but nothing precludes us from having such a feature on
> demand for capable displays as well.  Then users who don't want the
> effects of these characters on display could activate such a mode, and
> solve their problems without affecting the actual contents of the Info
> files.

I would suggest something slightly different which will solve the entire
problem rather than just part of it.  Have the minor mode translate the
buffer text (temporarily) into ASCII rather than just displaying it thus.
That way the user can search for `foo' or ... simply by using C-s.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).