README.unicode

   1                                                                    -*-text-*-
   2
   3 Problems, fixmes and other issues in the emacs-unicode branch
   4 -------------------------------------------------------------
   5
   6 Notes by fx to record various things of variable importance.  handa
   7 needs to check them -- don't take too seriously, especially with
   8 regard to completeness.
   9
  10 _Do take seriously that you don't want this branch unless you're
  11 actually working on it; you risk your data by actually using it._  If
  12 you just want to edit Unicode and/or unify iso-8859 et al, see the
  13 existing support and the extra stuff at
  14 <URL:ftp://dlpx1.dl.ac.uk/fx/emacs/Mule>, mostly now in the CVS trunk.
  15 (Editing support is mostly orthogonal to the internal representation.)
  16
  17  * SINGLE_BYTE_CHAR_P returns true for Latin-1 characters, which has
  18    undesirable effects.
  19
  20  * Rationalize character syntax and its relationship to the Unicode
  21    database.  Specifically, the latin-N.el files aren't consistent for
  22    common characters (and obviously have redundancies except in
  23    unibyte mode).
  24
  25  * Fontset handling and customization needs work.  We want to relate
  26    fonts to scripts, probably based on the Unicode blocks.  The
  27    presence of small-repertoire 10646-encoded fonts in XFree 4 is a
  28    pain, not currently worked round.
  29
  30         With the change on 2002-07-26, multiple fonts can be
  31         specified in a fontset for a specific range of characters.
  32         Each range can also be specified by script.  Before using
  33         ISO10646 fonts, Emacs checks their repertories to avoid such
  34         fonts that don't have a glyph for a specific character.
  35
  36  * Work is also needed on charset and coding system priorities.
  37
  38  * The relevant bits of latin1-disp.el need porting (and probably
  39    re-naming/updating).  See also cyril-util.el.
  40
  41  * Quail files need more work now the encoding is irrelevant.
  42
  43  * What to do with the old coding categories stuff?
  44
  45  * Syntax for symbols &c in characters.el needs looking at.
  46
  47  * The preferred-coding-system property of charsets should probably be
  48    junked unless it can be made more useful now.
  49
  50  * find-coding-systems-for-charsets needs re-writing or removing.
  51
  52  * find-multibyte-characters needs looking at.
  53
  54  * Implement Korean cp949/UHC and any other important missing
  55    charsets.
  56
  57  * Check up on definitions of tcvn and alternativnj.
  58
  59  * Lazy-load tables for unify-charset somehow?
  60
  61         Actually, Emacs clear out all charset maps and unify-map just
  62         before dumping, and their are loaded again on demand the
  63         dumped emacs.  But, those maps (char tables) generated while
  64         temacs is running can't be get rid of from the dumped emacs.
  65
  66  * Translation tables for {en,de}code currently aren't supported.
  67
  68  * Defining CCL coding systems currently doesn't work.
  69
  70  * iso-2022 charsets get unified on i/o.
  71
  72  * Revisit locale processing: look at treating the language and
  73    charset parts separately.  (Language should affect things like
  74    speling and calendar, but that's not a Unicode issue.)
  75
  76  * Handle Unicode combining characters usefully, e.g. diacritics, and
  77    handle more scripts specifically (à la Devanagari).  There are
  78    issues with canonicalization.
  79
  80  * Bidi is a separate issue with no support currently.
  81
  82  * DTRT with X keysyms.  We should get the right unicode for a given
  83    keysym, not decode raw bytes in some ill-defined coding system.
  84    (fx has some data on keysyms v. unicodes.)
  85
  86  * We need tabular input methods, e.g. for maths symbols.  (Not
  87    specific to Unicode.)
  88
  89  * Need multibyte text in menus, e.g. for the above.  (Not specific to
  90    Unicode.)
  91
  92  * Still can't have case pairs which have different byte lengths --
  93    can that be fixed for Turkish, at least?
  94
  95  * There's currently no support for Unicode normalization.
  96
  97  * Populate char-width-table correctly for Unicode chanaracters and
  98    worry about what happens when double-width charsets covering
  99    non-CJK characters are unified.
 100
 101  * Emacs 20/21 .elc files are currently not loadable.  It may or may
 102    not be possible to do this properly.
 103
 104         With the change on 2002-07-24, elc files generated by Emacs
 105         20.3 and later are correctly loaded (including those
 106         containing multibyte characters and compressed).  But, elc
 107         files generated by 20.2 and the primer are still not loadable.
 108         Is it really worth working on it?
 109
 110  * Encoding issues in babyl files/rmail need sorting out.
 111
 112  * Gnus still needs some attention, and we need to get changes
 113    accepted by Gnus maintainers...
 114
 115  * You can grep the code for lots of fixmes.