This version of recode barely starts supporting multiplexed or
super-charsets, that is, those encoding methods by which a single text
stream may contain a combination of more than one constituent charset.
The only multiplexed charset in recode is Mule, and even
then, it is only very partially implemented: the only correspondence
available is with Latin-1. The author fastly implemented this
only because he needed this for himself. However, it is intended that
Mule support to become more real in subsequent releases of recode.
Multiplexed charsets are not to be confused with mixed charset texts
(see section 3.7 Using mixed charset input). For mixed charset input, the rules allowing to distinguish
which charset is current, at any given place, are kind of informal, and
driven from the semantics of what the file contains. On the other side,
multiplexed charsets are designed to be interpreted fairly precisely,
and quite independently of any informational context.
The spelling Mule originally stands for multilingual
enhancement to GNU Emacs, it is the result of a collective
effort orchestrated by Handa Ken'ichi since 1993. When Mule got
rewritten in the main development stream of GNU Emacs 20, the FSF renamed
it MULE, meaning multilingual environment
in GNU Emacs. Even if the charset Mule is meant to stay
internal to GNU Emacs, it sometimes breaks loose in external files,
and as a consequence, a recoding tool is sometimes needed. Within Emacs,
Mule comes with Leim, which stands for libraries
of emacs input methods. One of these libraries is
named quail(16).
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