GNU bug report logs - #7962
23.2; capitalize letters ISO-8859-1 with diacritic signs in emacs 23.2.1

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From: Emmanuel Bigler <Emmanuel.Bigler <at> ens2m.fr>
To: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman <at> gmail.com>, Stefan Monnier <monnier <at> iro.umontreal.ca>, 7962 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#7962: 23.2; capitalize letters ISO-8859-1 with diacritic signs in emacs 23.2.1
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:49:22 +0100

Le 03/02/2011 19:21, Lennart Borgman a écrit :
> On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 2:34 PM, Emmanuel Bigler
> <Emmanuel.Bigler <at> ens2m.fr>  wrote:
>>
>> Using (toggle-enable-multibyte-characters nil) solves the problem but
>> brings in another issue, namely the compatibilityu of all my previous
>> documents written in unibyte ISO-8859-1. ... but this is another issue.
>
> That sounds like a very important issue. Are you filing a bug report for that?
>


Well, I do not know.

Let's describe the situation differently.

I have a legacy of documents typeset in unibyte and coded as
ISO-8859-1 or iso-8859-15 (which is a minor variant, e.g. the euro
sign...)

Taking into account that I only typeset documents requiring the
iso-8859-1 (or -15) unibyte coding system, I have absolutely no use of
UTF-8 and 2-byte coding system. But I accept that UTF-8 and 2-byte is
the future and that 1-byte iso-8859 is obsolete.

So far using emacs up to emacs 22 there was no issue at all. With
emacs 23 I am not sure that I understand what is going on, this is the
reason why I posted this "bug-or-feature" report. As far as I have
tested, a previously typeset document in unibyte iso-8859-1 is
perfectly handled, modified, saved by the latest emacs 23 and the
document seems to remain "classical-unibyte". So at a first glance
there is no compatibily issue so far in emacs 23.

Except for the only loss, to my opinion, is that the functions dealing
with upcasing or downcasing no longer work on unibyte words. This is
not a big issue. I can enter unibyte capital letters with my keyboard.
This did not change so I'm happy. As a old emacs-man, I simply miss
the comfort of capitalize-word on letters with diacritic signs in
unibyte ;-) Who cares ? ;-);-)
Most French people even do not know and do not care for the fact that
the classical typesetting rules in French state that the first letter
of a word at the beginning of a sentence should be capitalized EVEN if
is bears a diacritic sign, e.g. :

« À partir d'emacs 23, la fonction capitalize-word ne marche plus sur
les mots codés unibyte iso-8859-1 ... » ;-)

However I am reluctant to switch to UTF-8 for all my texts in English,
German, French, even Icelandic etc... i.e. Western European languages,
the only ones I'll ever typeset, which are perfectly handled in
unibyte iso-8859-1. This is another issue and as far as I have
understood, emacs 23 continues to handle my iso-8859 unibyte files as
usual so I do not complain.

Thanks again for your help !

--
Emmanuel

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