X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mailnull set sender to djgpp-bounces using -f Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 13:47:27 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: Thomas Mueller cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: GNU Emacs DOS (DJGPP) port converts upper-ASCII characters to ASCII 127 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On 14 Feb 2002, Thomas Mueller wrote: > I guess then if I wanted to build both for Linux and NetBSD, I could untgz into > a directory on a Linux partition and build from separate directories, since BSD > can read Linux file system, but Linux can't read BSD file system. For DOS, I'd > have to untgz separately onto a DOS partition, since DOS can't read Linux or BSD > file system, and can't handle long file names. Yes, this would solve the problem. > I use a DOS command-line program for SMTP, POP3 and NNTP What program is that, and where can one find it? > I wouldn't see any advantage trying to invoke this > program from within Emacs The advantage is that you use the same editor for writing the message, quoting the messages you reply to, spell-check the message with Emacs built-in support for Ispell, and have access to all the other powerful Emacs features related to email, like full control of the message headers, for example. > What do you mean by most or all DJGPP-supported platforms? I thought DJGPP was > only for DOS, though there are many DOSes out there: MS-DOS, DR-DOS, IBM PC-DOS, > FreeDOS (http://www.freedos.org/), Phystechsoft PTS-DOS, Datalight ROM-DOS, any > others? I meant Windows, mostly. I think most DJGPP users nowadays use DJGPP on Windows, not on plain DOS. > I tried w3 just to see if it would work when connected to the Internet. I was > prompted for the URL, but I got the error message that w3 was missing. Right, that's because w3 isn't part of the standard distribution. But it doesn't work in the DJGPP port anyway (no built-in network support, remember?), so don't run out looking for it on the net. > I already tried viewing HELLO in Emacs without --unibyte. Some of the hello > strings showed ASCII-127 characters, like an empty triangle or little house. Not every triangle you see means that there's an ASCII-127 character in the buffer. "C-u C-x =" is one way of telling. Emacs uses ASCII-127 for both the display and conversion of unsupported characters. When only the display is unsupported, the character in the file is not modified, but just remapped for display purposes. > When you say "print the entire HELLO file > with all the scripts", I assume you mean on screen rather than on a printer. No, I did mean a printer. > Printer drivers would be another issue. My printer has no support for Korean, > Japanese or Chinese but could print a graphic file. Use the ps-print-buffer command, it outputs a PostScript file that handles all the fonts you can find on SimTel.NET. If your printer doesn't support PostScript, install the Ghostscript package, which will convert PostScript into PCL commands, and supports almost any printer out there. The manual explains how to set up printing with Ghostscript. > EZ> In v20.x, this requires constant attention. Emacs 21 doesn't convert > EZ> unknown characters into ASCII 127, so it's safer. > > Is this problem with v20.x, converting strange characters to ASCII 127 and > saving that way, only in the DOS port, or does it apply to all ports: DOS, OS/2, > Linux, BSD and other Unixes, OpenVMS, BeOS, etc? It's not specific to the DOS port, it is specific to reading files where 8-bit characters are encoded in DOS codepages. If you tell Emacs on GNU/Linux to read a Latin-1 file as cp850, it will convert some of characters to ASCII 127 on Linux as well. The only DOS- specific part here is that in the DJGPP port, cp850 is assumed by default, whereas GNU/Linux assumes Latin-1 by default. > I guess I could do a test in > the Linux version by making a copy of a Korean or Chinese spam, then make a > slight change and change back, and save the modified (?) file, see what happens. It will never happen with Korean text, only with European text. But you can try that, of course, and see for yourself. > I prepared this message using DOS Emacs, hope the formatting will look neater > than it does on the Emacs screen. What's wrong with how it looks on your screen? Perhaps you should put the following line in your _emacs file: (add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill) This will cause Emacs to automatically wrap lines in all text-related modes (that includes mail-mode, the mode used for composing mail messages).