-*-mode: text; coding: latin-1;-*- Problems, fixmes and other issues in the emacs-unicode branch ------------------------------------------------------------- Notes by fx to record various things of variable importance. handa needs to check them -- don't take too seriously, especially with regard to completeness. _Do take seriously that you don't want this branch unless you're actually working on it; you risk your data by actually using it._ If you just want to edit Unicode and/or unify iso-8859 et al, see the existing support and the extra stuff at , mostly now in the CVS trunk. (Editing support is mostly orthogonal to the internal representation.) * SINGLE_BYTE_CHAR_P returns true for Latin-1 characters, which has undesirable effects. E.g.: (multibyte-string-p (let ((s "x")) (aset s 0 ?£) s)) => nil (multibyte-string-p (concat [?£])) => nil (text-char-description ?£) => "M-#" These examples are all fixed by the change of 2002-10-14, but there still exist questionalble SINGLE_BYTE_CHAR_P in the code (keymap.c and print.c). * Rationalize character syntax and its relationship to the Unicode database. (Applies mainly to symbol an punctuation syntax.) * Fontset handling and customization needs work. We want to relate fonts to scripts, probably based on the Unicode blocks. The presence of small-repertoire 10646-encoded fonts in XFree 4 is a pain, not currently worked round. With the change on 2002-07-26, multiple fonts can be specified in a fontset for a specific range of characters. Each range can also be specified by script. Before using ISO10646 fonts, Emacs checks their repertories to avoid such fonts that don't have a glyph for a specific character. fx has worked on fontset customization, but was stymied by basic problems with the way the default face is dealt with (and something else, I think). This needs revisiting. * Work is also needed on charset and coding system priorities. * The relevant bits of latin1-disp.el need porting (and probably re-naming/updating). See also cyril-util.el. * Quail files need more work now the encoding is largely irrelevant. * What to do with the old coding categories stuff? * The preferred-coding-system property of charsets should probably be junked unless it can be made more useful now. * find-multibyte-characters needs looking at. * Implement Korean cp949/UHC, BIG5-HKSCS and any other important missing charsets. * Lazy-load tables for unify-charset somehow? Actually, Emacs clear out all charset maps and unify-map just before dumping, and their are loaded again on demand the dumped emacs. But, those maps (char tables) generated while temacs is running can't be get rid of from the dumped emacs. * Translation tables for {en,de}code currently aren't supported. This should be fixed by the changes of 2002-10-14. * Defining CCL coding systems currently doesn't work. This should be fixed by the changes of 2003-01-30. * iso-2022 charsets get unified on i/o. With the change on 2003-01-06, decoding routines put `charset' property to decoded text, and iso-2022 encoder pay attention to it. Thus, for instance, reading and writing by iso-2022-7bit preserve the original designation sequences. The property name `preferred-charset' may be better? We may have to utilize this property to decide a font. * Revisit locale processing: look at treating the language and charset parts separately. (Language should affect things like speling and calendar, but that's not a Unicode issue.) * Handle Unicode combining characters usefully, e.g. diacritics, and handle more scripts specifically (à la Devanagari). There are issues with canonicalization. * Bidi is a separate issue with no support currently. * We need tabular input methods, e.g. for maths symbols. (Not specific to Unicode.) * Need multibyte text in menus, e.g. for the above. (Not specific to Unicode -- see Emacs etc/TODO, but now mostly works with gtk.) * There's currently no support for Unicode normalization. * Populate char-width-table correctly for Unicode chanaracters and worry about what happens when double-width charsets covering non-CJK characters are unified. * Emacs 20/21 .elc files are currently not loadable. It may or may not be possible to do this properly. With the change on 2002-07-24, elc files generated by Emacs 20.3 and later are correctly loaded (including those containing multibyte characters and compressed). But, elc files generated by 20.2 and the primer are still not loadable. Is it really worth working on it? * Rmail won't work with non-ASCII text. Encoding issues for Babyl files need sorting out, but rms says Babyl will go before this is released. * Gnus still needs some attention, and we need to get changes accepted by Gnus maintainers... * There are type errors lurking, e.g. in Fcheck_coding_systems_region. Define ENABLE_CHECKING to find them. * You can grep the code for lots of fixmes. * Old auto-save files, and similar files, such as Gnus drafts, containing non-ASCII characters probably won't be re-read correctly. New font handling mechanism with font backend method ---------------------------------------------------- This branch now contains new codes for handling fonts by multiple font backends. The old font handling codes still exist completely parallel to the new codes, and the new codes are used only when you configure Emacs with the argument "--enable-font-backend" and run Emacs with the same argument. The configure script, if invoked with "--enable-font-backend", checks existing of libraries freetype and fontconfig. If they are both available, macro "USE_FONT_BACKEND" is defined in src/config.h. In that case, the exiting of Xft library is checked too. The new files are: font.c -- main font handling code. xfont.c -- font-driver on X for X core fonts. ftfont.c -- generic font-driver for FreeType fonts. xftfont.c -- font-driver on X using Xft for FreeType fonts. ftxfont.c -- font-driver on X not using Xft for FreeType fonts. So we already have codes for X. For the other systems (win32 and mac), it seems that we need these files: bdffont.c -- generic font-driver for BDF fonts. w32font.c -- font driver on win32 using Windows native fonts. w32bdffont.c -- font-driver on win32 using BDF fonts. atmfont.c -- font-driver on mac using ATM fonts. It may be interesting if Emacs supports frame buffer directly and have these font driver. ftfbfont.c -- font-driver on FB for FreeType fonts. bdffbfont.c -- font-driver on FB for BDF fonts. Several other files have "#ifdef USE_FONT_BACKEND ... #endif" at the place where changed for this new font codes.