@c This is part of the Emacs manual.
@c Copyright (C) 1997, 1999-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
@c See file emacs.texi for copying conditions.
-@node International, Modes, Frames, Top
+@node International
@chapter International Character Set Support
@c This node is referenced in the tutorial. When renaming or deleting
@c it, the tutorial needs to be adjusted. (TUTORIAL.de)
used, generally don't have keys for all the characters in them. You
can insert characters that your keyboard does not support, using
@kbd{C-q} (@code{quoted-insert}) or @kbd{C-x 8 @key{RET}}
-(@code{ucs-insert}). @xref{Inserting Text}. Emacs also supports
+(@code{insert-char}). @xref{Inserting Text}. Emacs also supports
various @dfn{input methods}, typically one for each script or
language, which make it easier to type characters in the script.
@xref{Input Methods}.
This includes the Emacs initialization
file, @file{.emacs}, and the initialization files of packages
such as Gnus. However, you can specify unibyte loading for a
-particular Lisp file, by adding an entry @samp{unibyte: t} in a file
-local variables section (@pxref{File Variables}). Then that file is
-always loaded as unibyte text. Note that this does not represent a
-real @code{unibyte} variable, rather it just acts as an indicator
-to Emacs in the same way as @code{coding} does (@pxref{Specify Coding}).
+particular Lisp file, by adding an entry @samp{coding: raw-text} in a file
+local variables section. @xref{Specify Coding}.
+Then that file is always loaded as unibyte text.
@ignore
@c I don't see the point of this statement:
The motivation for these conventions is that it is more reliable to
always load any particular Lisp file in the same way.
@end ignore
-Note also that this feature only applies to @emph{loading} Lisp files
-for evaluation, not to visiting them for editing. You can also load a
-Lisp file as unibyte, on any one occasion, by typing @kbd{C-x
-@key{RET} c raw-text @key{RET}} immediately before loading it.
+You can also load a Lisp file as unibyte, on any one occasion, by
+typing @kbd{C-x @key{RET} c raw-text @key{RET}} immediately before
+loading it.
@c See http://debbugs.gnu.org/11226 for lack of unibyte tooltip.
@vindex enable-multibyte-characters
@cindex Euro sign
@cindex UTF-8
@quotation
-ASCII, Belarusian, Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian,
+ASCII, Belarusian, Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Cham,
Chinese-BIG5, Chinese-CNS, Chinese-EUC-TW, Chinese-GB, Chinese-GBK,
Chinese-GB18030, Croatian, Cyrillic-ALT, Cyrillic-ISO, Cyrillic-KOI8,
Czech, Devanagari, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Ethiopic, French,
which prefers Cyrillic characters and files encoded in Windows-1255).
@end quotation
-@cindex fonts for various scripts
-@cindex Intlfonts package, installation
To display the script(s) used by your language environment on a
-graphical display, you need to have a suitable font. If some of the
-characters appear as empty boxes or hex codes, you should install
-extra fonts. Your operating system may have optional fonts that
-you can install; or you can install the
-GNU Intlfonts package, which includes fonts for most supported
-scripts.@footnote{If you run Emacs on X, you may need to inform the X
-server about the location of the newly installed fonts with
-commands such as:
-@c FIXME? I feel like this may be out of date.
-@c Eg the intlfonts tarfile is ~ 10 years old.
-
-@example
- xset fp+ /usr/local/share/emacs/fonts
- xset fp rehash
-@end example
-}
+graphical display, you need to have suitable fonts.
@xref{Fontsets}, for more details about setting up your fonts.
@findex set-locale-environment
not when you are in the minibuffer).
Another facility for typing characters not on your keyboard is by
-using @kbd{C-x 8 @key{RET}} (@code{ucs-insert}) to insert a single
+using @kbd{C-x 8 @key{RET}} (@code{insert-char}) to insert a single
character based on its Unicode name or code-point; see @ref{Inserting
Text}.
behaves a bit differently. It additionally checks whether the
@c What determines this?
most-preferred coding system is recommended for use in MIME messages;
-if not, Emacs tells you that the most-preferred coding system is not
-recommended and prompts you for another coding system. This is so you
-won't inadvertently send a message encoded in a way that your
-recipient's mail software will have difficulty decoding. (You can
-still use an unsuitable coding system if you type its name in response
-to the question.)
+if not, it informs you of this fact and prompts you for another coding
+system. This is so you won't inadvertently send a message encoded in
+a way that your recipient's mail software will have difficulty
+decoding. (You can still use an unsuitable coding system if you enter
+its name at the prompt.)
@c It seems that select-message-coding-system does this.
@c Both sendmail.el and smptmail.el call it; i.e. smtpmail.el still
@table @kbd
@item C-x @key{RET} x @var{coding} @key{RET}
Use coding system @var{coding} for transferring selections to and from
-other window-based applications (@code{set-selection-coding-system}).
+other graphical applications (@code{set-selection-coding-system}).
@item C-x @key{RET} X @var{coding} @key{RET}
Use coding system @var{coding} for transferring @emph{one}
-selection---the next one---to or from another window-based application
+selection---the next one---to or from another graphical application
(@code{set-next-selection-coding-system}).
@item C-x @key{RET} p @var{input-coding} @key{RET} @var{output-coding} @key{RET}
A font typically defines shapes for a single alphabet or script.
Therefore, displaying the entire range of scripts that Emacs supports
requires a collection of many fonts. In Emacs, such a collection is
-called a @dfn{fontset}. A fontset is defined by a list of font specs,
+called a @dfn{fontset}. A fontset is defined by a list of font specifications,
each assigned to handle a range of character codes, and may fall back
-on another fontset for characters which are not covered by the fonts
+on another fontset for characters that are not covered by the fonts
it specifies.
+@cindex fonts for various scripts
+@cindex Intlfonts package, installation
Each fontset has a name, like a font. However, while fonts are
stored in the system and the available font names are defined by the
system, fontsets are defined within Emacs itself. Once you have
defined a fontset, you can use it within Emacs by specifying its name,
anywhere that you could use a single font. Of course, Emacs fontsets
-can use only the fonts that the system supports; if certain characters
-appear on the screen as hollow boxes, this means that the fontset in
-use for them has no font for those characters.@footnote{The Emacs
-installation instructions have information on additional font
-support.}
+can use only the fonts that the system supports. If some characters
+appear on the screen as empty boxes or hex codes, this means that the
+fontset in use for them has no font for those characters. In this
+case, or if the characters are shown, but not as well as you would
+like, you may need to install extra fonts. Your operating system may
+have optional fonts that you can install; or you can install the GNU
+Intlfonts package, which includes fonts for most supported
+scripts.@footnote{If you run Emacs on X, you may need to inform the X
+server about the location of the newly installed fonts with commands
+such as:
+@c FIXME? I feel like this may be out of date.
+@c Eg the intlfonts tarfile is ~ 10 years old.
+
+@example
+ xset fp+ /usr/local/share/emacs/fonts
+ xset fp rehash
+@end example
+}
Emacs creates three fontsets automatically: the @dfn{standard
fontset}, the @dfn{startup fontset} and the @dfn{default fontset}.
+@c FIXME? The doc of *standard*-fontset-spec says:
+@c "You have the biggest chance to display international characters
+@c with correct glyphs by using the *standard* fontset." (my emphasis)
+@c See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-04/msg00430.html
The default fontset is most likely to have fonts for a wide variety of
-non-@acronym{ASCII} characters and is the default fallback for the
+non-@acronym{ASCII} characters, and is the default fallback for the
other two fontsets, and if you set a default font rather than fontset.
-However it does not specify font family names, so results can be
+However, it does not specify font family names, so results can be
somewhat random if you use it directly. You can specify use of a
-specific fontset with the @samp{-fn} option. For example,
+particular fontset by starting Emacs with the @samp{-fn} option.
+For example,
@example
emacs -fn fontset-standard
@noindent
or just @samp{fontset-standard} for short.
- On GNUstep and Mac, fontset-standard is created using the value of
-@code{ns-standard-fontset-spec}, and on Windows it is
+ On GNUstep and Mac OS X, the standard fontset is created using the value of
+@code{ns-standard-fontset-spec}, and on MS Windows it is
created using the value of @code{w32-standard-fontset-spec}.
+@c FIXME? How does one access these, or do anything with them?
+@c Does it matter?
Bold, italic, and bold-italic variants of the standard fontset are
created automatically. Their names have @samp{bold} instead of
@samp{medium}, or @samp{i} instead of @samp{r}, or both.
@var{charset_encoding} field with @samp{startup}, then using the
resulting string to specify a fontset.
- For instance, if you start Emacs this way,
+ For instance, if you start Emacs with a font of this form,
+@c FIXME? I think this is a little misleading, because you cannot (?)
+@c actually specify a font with wildcards, it has to be a complete spec.
+@c Also, an X font specification of this form hasn't (?) been
+@c mentioned before now, and is somewhat obsolete these days.
+@c People are more likely to use a form like
+@c emacs -fn "DejaVu Sans Mono-12"
+@c How does any of this apply in that case?
@example
emacs -fn "*courier-medium-r-normal--14-140-*-iso8859-1"
@end example
-*-courier-medium-r-normal-*-14-140-*-*-*-*-fontset-startup
@end example
- The startup fontset will use the font that you specify or a variant
-with a different registry and encoding for all the characters which
+ The startup fontset will use the font that you specify, or a variant
+with a different registry and encoding, for all the characters that
are supported by that font, and fallback on @samp{fontset-default} for
other characters.
just like an actual font name. But be careful not to specify a fontset
name in a wildcard resource like @samp{Emacs*Font}---that wildcard
specification matches various other resources, such as for menus, and
-menus cannot handle fontsets.
+@c FIXME is this still true?
+menus cannot handle fontsets. @xref{X Resources}.
You can specify additional fontsets using X resources named
@samp{Fontset-@var{n}}, where @var{n} is an integer starting from 0.
@end smallexample
@noindent
-@var{fontpattern} should have the form of a standard X font name, except
+@var{fontpattern} should have the form of a standard X font name (see
+the previous fontset-startup example), except
for the last two fields. They should have the form
@samp{fontset-@var{alias}}.
In addition, when several consecutive fields are wildcards, Emacs
collapses them into a single wildcard. This is to prevent use of
auto-scaled fonts. Fonts made by scaling larger fonts are not usable
-for editing, and scaling a smaller font is not useful because it is
+for editing, and scaling a smaller font is not also useful, because it is
better to use the smaller font in its own size, which is what Emacs
does.
You may not have any Chinese font matching the above font
specification. Most X distributions include only Chinese fonts that
-have @samp{song ti} or @samp{fangsong ti} in @var{family} field. In
-such a case, @samp{Fontset-@var{n}} can be specified as below:
+have @samp{song ti} or @samp{fangsong ti} in the @var{family} field. In
+such a case, @samp{Fontset-@var{n}} can be specified as:
@smallexample
Emacs.Fontset-0: -*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-24,\
Fontsets can be modified using the function @code{set-fontset-font},
specifying a character, a charset, a script, or a range of characters
-to modify the font for, and a font-spec for the font to be used. Some
-examples are:
+to modify the font for, and a font specification for the font to be
+used. Some examples are:
@example
;; Use Liberation Mono for latin-3 charset.
@node Undisplayable Characters
@section Undisplayable Characters
- There may be a some non-@acronym{ASCII} characters that your
+ There may be some non-@acronym{ASCII} characters that your
terminal cannot display. Most text terminals support just a single
character set (use the variable @code{default-terminal-coding-system}
-(@pxref{Terminal Coding}) to tell Emacs which one); characters which
+to tell Emacs which one, @ref{Terminal Coding}); characters that
can't be encoded in that coding system are displayed as @samp{?} by
default.
accented letters and punctuation needed by various European languages
(and some non-European ones). Note that Emacs considers bytes with
codes in this range as raw bytes, not as characters, even in a unibyte
-session, i.e.@: if you disable multibyte characters. However, Emacs
+buffer, i.e.@: if you disable multibyte characters. However, Emacs
can still handle these character codes as if they belonged to
@emph{one} of the single-byte character sets at a time. To specify
@emph{which} of these codes to use, invoke @kbd{M-x
set-language-environment} and specify a suitable language environment
such as @samp{Latin-@var{n}}.
- For more information about unibyte operation, see @ref{Disabling
-Multibyte}. Note particularly that you probably want to ensure that
-your initialization files are read as unibyte if they contain
-non-@acronym{ASCII} characters.
+ For more information about unibyte operation, see
+@ref{Disabling Multibyte}.
@vindex unibyte-display-via-language-environment
Emacs can also display bytes in the range 160 to 255 as readable
set, Emacs can display these characters as @acronym{ASCII} sequences which at
least give you a clear idea of what the characters are. To do this,
load the library @code{iso-ascii}. Similar libraries for other
-Latin-@var{n} character sets could be implemented, but we don't have
-them yet.
+Latin-@var{n} character sets could be implemented, but have not been
+so far.
@findex standard-display-8bit
@cindex 8-bit display
On a graphical display, you should not need to do anything special to
use these keys; they should simply work. On a text terminal, you
-should use the command @code{M-x set-keyboard-coding-system} or the
+should use the command @code{M-x set-keyboard-coding-system} or customize the
variable @code{keyboard-coding-system} to specify which coding system
your keyboard uses (@pxref{Terminal Coding}). Enabling this feature
will probably require you to use @kbd{ESC} to type Meta characters;
@findex list-character-sets
@kbd{M-x list-character-sets} displays a list of all supported
charsets. The list gives the names of charsets and additional
-information to identity each charset (see
-@url{http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/} for details). In this list,
+information to identity each charset; see the
+@url{http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/, International Register of
+Coded Character Sets} for more details. In this list,
charsets are divided into two categories: @dfn{normal charsets} are
listed first, followed by @dfn{supplementary charsets}. A
supplementary charset is one that is used to define another charset
Hebrew, whose natural ordering of horizontal text for display is from
right to left. However, digits and Latin text embedded in these
scripts are still displayed left to right. It is also not uncommon to
-have small portions of text in Arabic or Hebrew embedded in otherwise
-Latin document, e.g., as comments and strings in a program source
+have small portions of text in Arabic or Hebrew embedded in an otherwise
+Latin document; e.g., as comments and strings in a program source
file. For these reasons, text that uses these scripts is actually
@dfn{bidirectional}: a mixture of runs of left-to-right and
right-to-left characters.
directionality when they are displayed. The default value is
@code{t}.
+@cindex base direction of paragraphs
+@cindex paragraph, base direction
Each paragraph of bidirectional text can have its own @dfn{base
direction}, either right-to-left or left-to-right. (Paragraph
+@c paragraph-separate etc have no influence on this?
boundaries are empty lines, i.e.@: lines consisting entirely of
-whitespace characters.) Text in left-to-right paragraphs begins at
-the left margin of the window and is truncated or continued when it
-reaches the right margin. By contrast, text in right-to-left
-paragraphs begins at the right margin and is continued or truncated at
-the left margin.
+whitespace characters.) Text in left-to-right paragraphs begins on
+the screen at the left margin of the window and is truncated or
+continued when it reaches the right margin. By contrast, text in
+right-to-left paragraphs is displayed starting at the right margin and
+is continued or truncated at the left margin.
@vindex bidi-paragraph-direction
Emacs determines the base direction of each paragraph dynamically,
jump when point traverses reordered bidirectional text. Similarly, a
highlighted region covering a contiguous range of character positions
may look discontinuous if the region spans reordered text. This is
-normal and similar to behavior of other programs that support
+normal and similar to the behavior of other programs that support
bidirectional text.