bug#20499: C-x 8 shorthands for curved quotes, Euro, etc.

[Paul Eggert]

>         It just iterates over the range given (or U+00A8 through U+02AF
>         by default) and maps “LATIN + COMBINING” decompositions to
>         'iso-transl entries.

Thanks for the explanation.

>         But are we actually limited to two-character abbreviations only?
>         Why not allow for, say, C-x 8 " ' u?

We can do that, but only if the combining prefixes are distinct from the letters 
themselves.  My previous proposal didn't do that, e.g., it used "u" for breve, 
which would make things like "C-x 8 , u E" ambiguous (is that u with a cedilla 
followed by plain E, or E with a cedilla and breve?).  So I guess more thought 
is needed.


PS. about patches and attachments:

>         However, given that ‘text/x-patch’ is not a /registered/ MIME
>         type, I believe the above does not apply.

Once one starts using x-* types anything goes, is my impression.

>         If Thunderbird /knows/ the encoding (“character set”) of the
>         contents of the MIME part,

It doesn't, which is why Thunderbird doesn't say.

Regardless of what one's opinion of what the standard says or should say, it's 
pretty clear that these sorts of attachments are often sent and generally work; 
if they don't work with Gnus then that's probably a Gnus bug report worth 
filing.  The Gnus manual says one should report a bug with "M-x gnus-bug".  I 
tried that, but it complained "Gnus has been shut down", so I gave up.  Since 
you're a Gnus user, I hope you can take on the task of filing a bug report.