From: Gottfried Barthel (Gottfried.Barthel@UNI-KONSTANZ.DE)
Date: 26 Feb 00, 08:08 EST
From: Gottfried Barthel <Gottfried.Barthel@UNI-KONSTANZ.DE> Subject: Re: European Users: Your opinion about ISO 8859 question ? Hi Andrew, (CC to ALPHA-D) thanks for your answer. Fortunately, you Cc'ed it to the ALPHA-D list, so the people who are much more experienced than myself can read your ideas. My pretty much simple-minded idea was that something like what you are realizing for Emacs should be possible for Alpha as well. For lack of other experience, let alone expertise, I am only speaking of latin-1 or mac-roman or IBM 850 or ..., i.e., encoding of European languages like French, Spanish, German, scandinavian languages, ... Ideally, I am dreaming of an editor that, when reading a file containing such "non-ASCII" characters, recognizes the encoding -- asking the user in case of doubt --, displays the file "correctly" (i.e., an accented character, a German Umlaut, a special ligature should be displayed just "as they should be"), understands the keystrokes or key combinations that produce these characters on the Mac (e.g., the Umlaut keys on the German keyboard, or the dead accent key combinations), otherwise allows to enter characters directly like Emacs' C-q <octal number>, and then puts the corresponding 8-bit char. into the file so that, say, a ISO encoded file could be read by any UNIX editor without any further transformation. I don't know how you manage to make Emacs deal properly with ISO Latin-1 or Mac, but as I wrote you some time ago, Emacs 20.5 displays correctly the ISO Latin-1 encoded German special characters contained in that German language tutorial ?/etc/TUTORIAL.de, whereas Alpha or BBEdit display the MacRoman 8bit character with the same code number instead. My vague idea is that future Mac editors might be able to attach some "flag" associated with the file that describes its encoding, setting the default to standard Mac encoding in order to handle correctly older files without such a flag. But of course I have no idea about the amount of work that's possibly involved. Still, I am wondering about Apple's policy with the BSD UNIX-based OS X - shifting to ISO as other UNIX platforms, or not? Perhaps my use of the word "encoding" is not the proper use, but I hope that in spite of possibly wrong terminology, I made my ideas sufficiently clear. How is your Emacs port doing? I had little time to spend for experiments; perhaps now, after the end of the winter semester, things get slightly better. Best regards, Gottfried On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Andrew Choi wrote: > Hi Gottfried, > > Since Alpha supports scripting in TCL, is it not possible to invoke > another program such as Cyclone from it to perform the translation > from ISO Latin-1 or 2 to/from MacRoman when saving/loading files? > > ATSUI, or Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging, has been part of > the Mac OS since version 8. The Text Encoding Conversion Manager was > also added around that time, which converts among (practically) all > known encodings (and of course these include the ISO encodings). So > the ISO Latin-1 and Latin-2 encodings are supported by Mac OS, > although somewhat indirectly. Since Mac OS 8 was released quite a > while ago, it would seem that software developers for whatever reason > are not eagerly incorporating these into their applications. Perhaps > their attention has been drawn to planning to deal with the new API's > of Mac OS X? > > Andrew. >