[mew-int 01595] Re: windows 1252

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Kazu" == Kazu Yamamoto <(山本和彦) <kazu at example.com>> writes:

    Kazu> Q1) According to the page above, 0x8f is undefined, and 0x9e
    Kazu> is defined as LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH CARON.

    Kazu>     But Emacs 21.3.50 treated 0x8f as LATIN SMALL LETTER Z
    Kazu> WITH CARON and 0x9e as undefined.

    Kazu>     Is this a bug?

Yes.  CP1252.TXT from the Unicode Consortium also has 0x9E as LATIN
SMALL LETTER Z WITH CARON.

    Kazu> Q2) However the encoding is different from the one above. Is
    Kazu> this encoding correct?

The encoding below "ESC $ - 1" uses a multibyte private charset in the
GR register, then switches back to Latin-1 with "ESC - A".  Since
Windows 1252 is just Latin-1 in 0xA0--0xFF, this is the expected
result.  I don't recognize the encoding offhand, but I guess it's some
transform of Unicode, probably the mule-unicode charset.

    Kazu> Note that I verified that Emacs can read the ctext file
    Kazu> correctly.

Then the obvious advice is that mew should just use that encoding, and
recommend GNU Emacs to those who insist on Windows 1252 (etc) instead
of ISO 8859/1.  I doubt that XEmacs will use this private charset;
it's really too late to add to 21.4, and 21.5 will take Stefan's
advice and recommend Unicode (UTF-8) for this purpose.  We recognize
the backward compatibility problem that mew faces, but prefer all
standard-with-XEmacs external encodings to be standard to improve
portability to other apps, and to leave all ISO 2022 private charsets
to the user.  It's a tough choice.

The only real question is will emacs-unicode continue to support the
mule-unicode charsets as external encodings.  I suppose so, but you'd
have to ask Handa-san and/or Dave Love.  If not, then I suggest you
follow Stefan's advice and start moving to UTF-8 immediately.

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