Academic Tutorials



English | French | Portugese | German | Italian
Home Advertise Payments Recommended Websites Interview Questions FAQs
News Source Codes E-Books Downloads Jobs Web Hosting
Chats

Emacs Tutorial
Emacs Getting In and Out
Emacs Minibuffer
Emacs Using Vi
Emacs Features
Emacs Polyglot
Emacs Help for the Translator
Emacs Bookmarks and Registers

HTML Tutorials
HTML Tutorial
XHTML Tutorial
CSS Tutorial
TCP/IP Tutorial
CSS 1.0
CSS 2.0
HLML
XML Tutorials
XML Tutorial
XSL Tutorial
XSLT Tutorial
DTD Tutorial
Schema Tutorial
XForms Tutorial
XSL-FO Tutorial
XML DOM Tutorial
XLink Tutorial
XQuery Tutorial
XPath Tutorial
XPointer Tutorial
RDF Tutorial
SOAP Tutorial
WSDL Tutorial
RSS Tutorial
WAP Tutorial
Web Services Tutorial
Browser Scripting
JavaScript Tutorial
VBScript Tutorial
DHTML Tutorial
HTML DOM Tutorial
WMLScript Tutorial
E4X Tutorial
Server Scripting
ASP Tutorial
PERL Tutorial
SQL Tutorial
ADO Tutorial
CVS
Python
Apple Script
PL/SQL Tutorial
SQL Server
PHP
.NET (dotnet)
Microsoft.Net
ASP.Net
.Net Mobile
C# : C Sharp
ADO.NET
VB.NET
VC++
Multimedia
SVG Tutorial
Flash Tutorial
Media Tutorial
SMIL Tutorial
Photoshop Tutorial
Gimp Tutorial
Matlab
Gnuplot Programming
GIF Animation Tutorial
Scientific Visualization Tutorial
Graphics
Web Building
Web Browsers
Web Hosting
W3C Tutorial
Web Building
Web Quality
Web Semantic
Web Careers
Weblogic Tutorial
SEO
Web Site Hosting
Domain Name
Java Tutorials
Java Tutorial
JSP Tutorial
Servlets Tutorial
Struts Tutorial
EJB Tutorial
JMS Tutorial
JMX Tutorial
Eclipse
J2ME
JBOSS
Programming Langauges
C Tutorial
C++ Tutorial
Visual Basic Tutorial
Data Structures Using C
Cobol
Assembly Language
Mainframe
Forth Programming
Lisp Programming
Pascal
Delphi
Fortran
OOPs
Data Warehousing
CGI Programming
Emacs Tutorial
Gnome
ILU
Soft Skills
Communication Skills
Time Management
Project Management
Team Work
Leadership Skills
Corporate Communication
Negotiation Skills
Database Tutorials
Oracle
MySQL
Operating System
BSD
Symbian
Unix
Internet
IP-Masquerading
IPC
MIDI
Software Testing
Testing
Firewalls
SAP Module
ERP
ABAP
Business Warehousing
SAP Basis
Material Management
Sales & Distribution
Human Resource
Netweaver
Customer Relationship Management
Production and Planning
Networking Programming
Corba Tutorial
Networking Tutorial
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft PowerPoint
Microsoft Publisher
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Front Page
Microsoft InfoPath
Microsoft Access
Accounting
Financial Accounting
Managerial Accounting
Network Sites


Polyglot Emacs


Previoushome Next






Polyglot Emacs 20.4


A look at multilingual Emacs.


Ken'ichi Handa's Mule (multilingual Emacs) first appeared at the end of 1992. After almost five years, the Mule enhancements were included with GNU Emacs 20.x. For those of us who have yearned for multi-script capability since our first encounter with a computer (more than twenty years ago), it has been a long and often frustrating wait.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T
We are now at GNU Emacs version 20.4 and things are finally beginning to look interesting to people who wish to work with multiple scripts on Linux. I am using Emacs for translation, exegesis and preparing reference material in multiple scripts.

Who wants to install a special Japanese Linux just to be able to read a Japanese source file for a translation job or read and write Japanese e-mail? I want to be able to include Chinese bibliographies, text and notes in the papers I write. I would also like to be able to include Tibetan or Greek scripts for philosophical or technical terms, along with their transliteration into Latin script. When I am discussing the structure of Chinese characters, I want to be able to make comparisons with Egyptian hieroglyphs. I want my quotations of French and German to look like French and German. I want to be able to publish all this on web pages as well as my PostScript printer. Some high-priced programs are coming out that address these issues, but Emacs 20.4 is here now. It runs on the best generally available operating system in the world, GNU/Linux, and it is free.

The image “/images/emacs/2178f1.png” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

As an example of using Emacs to prepare multi-script reference material, let's look at the Buddhist numerical lists I am currently working on. Without much difficulty, I can write this list with a pen on a piece of paper. See Figure 1 for a bitmap of a page from my handwritten list. (Apologies for my poor calligraphy.) To get these scripts into a computer text file requires an input method specific to each script. Fortunately, Emacs comes with Quail, which has a method to input each script in this example and many more.

To invoke Quail for Devanagari, use the Mule menu or type:

ctrl-x return
ctrl-\ devanagar-transliteration

Three other choices are available. For Tibetan, you will want tibetan-wylie. For Chinese, more than twenty methods are available. I use chinese-py-b5 for traditional characters and chinese-tonepy for the simplified characters. The Quail Japanese input method is adequate for short strings, but not extensive input. This is one place where I feel a free input method editor for Linux is needed that equals or surpasses Microsoft's free Japanese IME for Windows. Wnn 4.2, the last free version of Wnn, worked well. I have used it in the past with Mule, but so far I have not be able to get it to work with Emacs.

Soon, I hope to add the Korean, Thai, Lao and Vietnamese equivalents of each term in each list. All these are supported by Emacs. Finally, I hope to add the Mongolian script, which is not yet available in Emacs.

As you start to use several different input methods, you may soon find the command to invoke them, ctrl-x return ctrl-\ cumbersome. I rebind it with:

meta-x global-set-key f3 return
set-input-method

While you're at it, you might as well bind the command universal-coding-system-argument to something handy—I use f2.

universal-coding-system-argument is the command that lets you specify which coding system you want Emacs to use when you execute your next command. If you do much multi-script work, this will probably be ctrl-x ctrl-v return, which revisits the file you just visited. On the revisit, Emacs uses the coding system you specified as the universal-coding-system-argument. From the main Emacs menu, you can select Mule/Set Coding System/Next Command to do the same thing. (See Emacs Manual 31.4.5 for details on rebinding keys.)

For information on each input method and sometimes a list of the characters you can use with it, type ctrl-h I. As usual in Emacs, tab will give you a list of choices if you don't know the exact name of the input method you are after. ctrl-g escapes from whatever you are doing in the mini-buffer. I said “sometimes” because some lists are missing. For example, in response to ctrl-h I ipa, Emacs returns “Input method: ipa (IPA in mode line) for IPA International Phonetic Alphabet for English, French, German and Italian” but provides no list of the actual symbols. For Devanagari, on the other hand, a full list of the letters of the script is presented. Not given are the details on how to evoke several operations essential for being able to input the script properly. If you are familiar with the script, you can probably hack your way through. If, like me, you are a beginner and merely attempting to input it from a transcription in Latin script, even assuming your transcription is precise, you will not be pleased. Detailed descriptions of the various input methods are needed.

Start with Tibetan. Type the Wylie transliteration and the script appears—very smooth. For beginners, it is easier than writing Tibetan by hand. For the time being, I had to give up trying to input Devanagari. You may have better luck.

All these input methods come in a package called Leim. As of this writing, Leim is bundled with the Emacs-20.3.92 from ftp://ftp.etl.go.jp/pub/mule/.notready/, but it must be downloaded as a separate package for the Emacs pre-release from ftp://alpha.gnu.org/. Anyway, if Emacs cannot find all files included with Leim when it compiles on your system, you won't have any input methods. Let's hope the distributions will include Leim by default and give you an option to exclude it.

To evoke the multi-script capabilities of the new Emacs, another essential ingredient is Intlfonts 1.x. At present, it is version 1.2. This package provides all the fonts you need to display all the scripts. It, too, must be installed before you will find any joy in multi-script work.

The latest version of ps-print.el that comes with Emacs allows you to at least dump your multiple-script files to the laser printer. Currently, you must be content with “not scalable” bit-mapped fonts where one size fits all, but this is an essential first step. Perhaps CJK-TeX by Werner Lemberg (xlwy01@uxp1.hrz.uni-dortmund.de) or Omega, the new, purportedly internationalized TeX, will generously give us the ability to produce high-class, camera-ready, multi-script output for printing and a description of how to do it.

 

In Figure 2, we see the same text as in Figure 1 entered into an Emacs buffer, or as much of it as I could enter without a better understanding of the Devanagari input method.

It could be argued that we should not look to Emacs for help in printing, aside from the minimum requirement of being able to dump multi-script texts to the printer. Maybe the same holds for Web publishing—I don't know. However, it is frustrating to create a document in five or more scripts perfectly well in Emacs and then not be able to print it at a camera-ready level of quality, or publish it on the Web where the only character set that would allow the inclusion of all five scripts, with some on-going support, is Unicode, particularly in its UTF-8 encoding.

If there were an option to map the multi-script file in Emacs to the Unicode character set and then save it in UTF-8 encoding, ithe file would be directly available as content for an XML or HTML document. True, some browsers cannot understand Unicode yet, and the browser user may not have all the fonts installed, but this is bound to change for the better soon. One thing for sure: few will be able to read it in Mule internal format or even in a mix of ISO-2022 character sets/encodings.

Regarding a Unicode converter for Emacs, Miyashita Hisashi took a first shot at a Mule internal-encoding-to-Unicode converter with his MULE-UCS converter, but as of this writing I have not been able to install it. I noticed on the Unicode mailing list that Mark Leisher (mleisher@crl.nmsu.edu) also has one under construction. Hopefully, by the time this article is printed, we will be able to produce a Unicode/UTF-8-encoded file from Emacs.



Be the first one to comment on this page.




  Emacs Tutorial eBooks

No eBooks on Emacs could be found as of now.

 
 Emacs Tutorial FAQs
More Links » »
 
 Emacs Tutorial Interview Questions
More Links » »
 
 Emacs Tutorial Articles

No Emacs Articles could be found as of now.

 
 Emacs Tutorial News

No News on Emacs could be found as of now.

 
 Emacs Tutorial Jobs

No Emacs Articles could be found as of now.


Share And Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • blinkbits
  • BlinkList
  • blogmarks
  • co.mments
  • connotea
  • del.icio.us
  • De.lirio.us
  • digg
  • Fark
  • feedmelinks
  • Furl
  • LinkaGoGo
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Netvouz
  • RawSugar
  • Reddit
  • scuttle
  • Shadows
  • Simpy
  • Smarking
  • Spurl
  • TailRank
  • Wists
  • YahooMyWeb

Previoushome Next

Keywords: Polyglot Emacs, Emacs, Emacs, Emacs tutorial, Emacs tutorial pdf, history of Emacs, Custamizing Style Sheet, learn Emacs

HTML Quizzes
HTML Quiz
XHTML Quiz
CSS Quiz
TCP/IP Quiz
CSS 1.0 Quiz
CSS 2.0 Quiz
HLML Quiz
XML Quizzes
XML Quiz
XSL Quiz
XSLT Quiz
DTD Quiz
Schema Quiz
XForms Quiz
XSL-FO Quiz
XML DOM Quiz
XLink Quiz
XQuery Quiz
XPath Quiz
XPointer Quiz
RDF Quiz
SOAP Quiz
WSDL Quiz
RSS Quiz
WAP Quiz
Web Services Quiz
Browser Scripting Quizzes
JavaScript Quiz
VBScript Quiz
DHTML Quiz
HTML DOM Quiz
WMLScript Quiz
E4X Quiz
Server Scripting Quizzes
ASP Quiz
PERL Quiz
SQL Quiz
ADO Quiz
CVS Quiz
Python Quiz
Apple Script Quiz
PL/SQL Quiz
SQL Server Quiz
PHP Quiz
.NET (dotnet) Quizzes
Microsoft.Net Quiz
ASP.Net Quiz
.Net Mobile Quiz
C# : C Sharp Quiz
ADO.NET Quiz
VB.NET Quiz
VC++ Quiz
Multimedia Quizzes
SVG Quiz
Flash Quiz
Media Quiz
SMIL Quiz
Photoshop Quiz
Gimp Quiz
Matlab Quiz
Gnuplot Programming Quiz
GIF Animation Quiz
Scientific Visualization Quiz
Graphics Quiz
Web Building Quizzes
Web Browsers Quiz
Web Hosting Quiz
W3C Quiz
Web Building Quiz
Web Quality Quiz
Web Semantic Quiz
Web Careers Quiz
Weblogic Quiz
SEO Quiz
Web Site Hosting Quiz
Domain Name Quiz
Java Quizzes
Java Quiz
JSP Quiz
Servlets Quiz
Struts Quiz
EJB Quiz
JMS Quiz
JMX Quiz
Eclipse Quiz
J2ME Quiz
JBOSS Quiz
Programming Langauges Quizzes
C Quiz
C++ Quiz
Visual Basic Quiz
Data Structures Using C Quiz
Cobol Quiz
Assembly Language Quiz
Mainframe Quiz
Forth Programming Quiz
Lisp Programming Quiz
Pascal Quiz
Delphi Quiz
Fortran Quiz
OOPs Quiz
Data Warehousing Quiz
CGI Programming Quiz
Emacs Quiz
Gnome Quiz
ILU Quiz
Soft Skills Quizzes
Communication Skills Quiz
Time Management Quiz
Project Management Quiz
Team Work Quiz
Leadership Skills Quiz
Corporate Communication Quiz
Negotiation Skills Quiz
Database Quizzes
Oracle Quiz
MySQL Quiz
Operating System Quizzes
BSD Quiz
Symbian Quiz
Unix Quiz
Internet Quiz
IP-Masquerading Quiz
IPC Quiz
MIDI Quiz
Software Testing Quizzes
Testing Quiz
Firewalls Quiz
SAP Module Quizzes
ERP Quiz
ABAP Quiz
Business Warehousing Quiz
SAP Basis Quiz
Material Management Quiz
Sales & Distribution Quiz
Human Resource Quiz
Netweaver Quiz
Customer Relationship Management Quiz
Production and Planning Quiz
Networking Programming Quizzes
Corba Quiz
Networking Quiz
Microsoft Office Quizzes
Microsoft Word Quiz
Microsoft Outlook Quiz
Microsoft PowerPoint Quiz
Microsoft Publisher Quiz
Microsoft Excel Quiz
Microsoft Front Page Quiz
Microsoft InfoPath Quiz
Microsoft Access Quiz
Accounting Quizzes
Financial Accounting Quiz
Managerial Accounting Quiz
Testimonials | Contact Us | Link to Us | Site Map
Copyright ? 2008. Academic Tutorials.com. All rights reserved Privacy Policies | About Us
Our Portals : Academic Tutorials | Best eBooksworld | Beyond Stats | City Details | Interview Questions | Discussions World | Excellent Mobiles | Free Bangalore | Give Me The Code | Gog Logo | Indian Free Ads | Jobs Assist | New Interview Questions | One Stop FAQs | One Stop GATE | One Stop GRE | One Stop IAS | One Stop MBA | One Stop SAP | One Stop Testing | Webhosting in India | Dedicated Server in India | Sirf Dosti | Source Codes World | Tasty Food | Tech Archive | Testing Interview Questions | Tests World | The Galz | Top Masala | Vyom | Vyom eBooks | Vyom International | Vyom Links | Vyoms | Vyom World | Important Websites
Copyright ? 2003-2024 Vyom Technosoft Pvt. Ltd., All Rights Reserved.