Re: Encoding of etc/HELLO

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I agree that it is unlikely in
> European cultures, but it isn't impossible.  And what do we lose by
> leaving the information in the file?

We lose simplicity and stability, because the etc/HELLO European charset 
information is often wrong for the purposes of display.

For example, currently etc/HELLO has a charset transition in the middle of the 
Maltese word “Bonġu”. If somebody actually specified a different font for 
iso-8859-3 because they wanted to display Maltese+Esperanto differently from 
English etc. (which as you note is unlikely, but suppose someone does it anyway 
to show off this Emacs feature), then their display would be glitched up in the 
middle of “Bonġu”. So as things stand this is a lurking bug in etc/HELLO. If we 
omitted needless charset transitions we wouldn't have to worry about correcting 
bugs like this one.

> We need to have the corresponding property in Emacs first, and we need
> to have infrastructure for letting 'lang' affect what we want it to
> affect, at least font selection.  Only after that we can implement
> this in enriched.el.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of this issue. I don't see a bug report for it; should I 
add an enhancement request?

In the meantime how about if we mark up etc/HELLO with lang commands instead of 
x-charset commands, except that we also keep x-charset commands that actually 
affect Emacs display in common use (e.g., CJK charsets)? When we get lang 
working, we can then remove the remaining x-charset commands.