Hi Laurent,

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002 01:05:42 +0100 (WEST)
 Laurent Siebenmann <sieben@cristal.math.u-psud.fr> wrote:

>  LS> Omega users (using their near infinite 256^2
>  LS> capacity) can stack German Russian and Polish (disjointly)
>  LS> into one vf encoding and one hyphenation scheme.  This
>  LS> involves something less rigid than basic unicode.
>
> Stacking was to be "disjoint" so the "sharing" of letters
> by Polish and German is a red herring.  The stacked languages would
> normally be displayed in an editor with some obvious visible
> distinction (say color) so a German A and a Polish A look different.
> In this way Omega suppresses  a lot of TeX complexities ---
> which is exactly what Ruprecht wanted.

first, i wonder, how you can make a distinction (say color) in your editor
for German A and Polish A for text files?? text files do not have any
additional structure besides characters.

second, if you make such a distinction for German A and Polish A,
it is effectively the same as using markup LaTeX commands (i.e. you
have to mark some text as polish, and other as german in your editor);

and the explicit switching (using commands written in plain characters like
\textgerman) is simpler: it does not require additional support in the editor
for "color" distinction in plain text files, and does not require to create
VF files with separated polish and german (and whatever other) languages.

in other words, your approach is practically unusable: it is hard to
implement, it is non-flexible (requires changing if one more language needs
to be added, or if new font shapes need to ne used), and gives unneeded
complications to what can be achieved with plain markup commands.

i doubt if anyone will ever bother to implement such a thing for omega (and
write a special dedicated text editor) -- it is much simpler ot use language
switching to get proper hyphenation.

> Vladimir says that this approach works "more-or-less" with
> stacked Russian and English.  What are its worst faults?  This
> system is *in use* so users should be warned early and often
> of any significant failings.

there are some issues with hyphenation. for combined languages,
the hyphenation of english may be not equivalent than for separate english
and russian. if you are interested in more details, i can provide them
later.

> PS. Could someone please point out an URL for the emacs
> Cyrillic kit (for linux and win98)?

cyrillic support comes with emacs by default.
you may need to install some cyrillic fonts for your system, but both
linux and win98 usually come with cyrillic fonts (or you can download the
intlfonts package ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/intlfonts/).

at least, i just installed Emacs on a purely english XP system (in US, not in
Russia), and Emacs works out of the box with cyrillic (XP comes with unicode
truetype fonts which Emacs can use just fine without any configuring). just
grab emacs from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/windows/emacs/latest/

> Likewise for its UTF8
> apparatus.  (I didn't notice them in my 2002 download of emacs.)

look for the "mule-ucs" package (forgot it's URL, but you can easily find
it in search engines).

Best,
v.