[tz] [PATCH] Switch back to ASCII for symbols.

[Ian Abbott]

On 20/06/14 01:51, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Garrett Wollman reported privately that XEmacs 21.4.22, the current
> stable version, doesn't work with the UTF-8 recently introduced
> into our commentary.  For example, the UTF-8 character '−'
> (MINUS SIGN), which is stored as the three bytes "\342\210\222",
> displays as 'â\210\222'.  For proper names this is annoying but
> tolerable, as there's little loss in utility from (say) 'Racoviță'
> to its display form 'RacoviÈ\233Ä\203'.  But for symbols this is a
> real pain that can make it hard to understand the documentation, e.g.,
> 'Release 2014e – 2014-06-12 21:53:52 −0700' displays as
> 'Release 2014e â\200\223 2014-06-12 21:53:52 â\210\2220700'.
> To work around this problem, make the following substitutions in
> commentary to mostly revert these symbols to their pre-UTF-8 versions:
> '§' -> 'section', '°' -> 'degrees', '±' -> '+-', '–' -> '-' (en
> dash), '—' -> '--' (em dash), '′' -> "'", '″' -> '"', '→' -> '->',
> '−' -> '-' (minus sign), '≤' -> '<='.  Leave proper names and
> foreign words in UTF-8.

I'd have thought that was XEmacs' problem defaulting to the "wrong" 
charset.  Could it be fixed by adding a modeline or perhaps a UTF-8 BOM 
as a hint about the character set?  (I don't know how well zic or 
third-party tools would cope with a BOM, but a modeline ought to be no 
problem.)

-- 
-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd.    E-mail: <abbotti at mev.co.uk>        )=-
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