Gedit Review (Softpedia.com) [LWN.net]

Gedit Review (Softpedia.com)

Posted Jun 12, 2006 23:11 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Gedit Review (Softpedia.com) by khim
Parent article: Gedit Review (Softpedia.com)

Emacs is *definitely* capable of UTF-8 text display (and text in virtually any other encoding one could possibly imagine).

There must be a configuration problem somewhere (probably in the X11 fonts, that's where problems tend to lie).

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Gedit Review (Softpedia.com)

Posted Jun 12, 2006 23:18 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (9 responses)

Emacs is *definitely* capable of UTF-8 text display (and text in virtually any other encoding one could possibly imagine).

Are you sure ? Can you see "'a' with a ring above, cedila below and acute accent over all this" character in emacs?

There must be a configuration problem somewhere (probably in the X11 fonts, that's where problems tend to lie).

May be - but then why gEdit can show text correctly ? As I've said I would not be surprised is emacs has some mode where it can show combining characters right (emacs is wast and there are a lot of knobs) but I was unable to find such mode :-(

Gedit Review (Softpedia.com)

Posted Jun 13, 2006 3:08 UTC (Tue) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] (7 responses)

it's very simple. if your env is not set to read/save "utf8" then katepart
doesn't assume that's the encoding for the file. in which case go to the
open file dialog and ensure that utf8 is the selected encoding in the
upper right corner.

but katepart does indeed handle utf8, and dozens or other encodings,
absolutely perfectly.

Encoding in Kate

Posted Jun 13, 2006 6:29 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (6 responses)

I have often wondered why doesn't kwrite auto-detect text encoding? It should be fairly easy to do, but every time it pretends that my ISO 8859-15 encoded text is UTF-8. Even when it's an HTML file and the webpage says otherwise. It is a bit annoying.

Encoding in Kate

Posted Jun 13, 2006 9:12 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (5 responses)

Autodetecting a text encoding is definitely not simple at all -- in fact,
most people who've tried it agree that it's impossible do do correctly
and reliably.

Encoding in Kate

Posted Jun 13, 2006 9:16 UTC (Tue) by piman (guest, #8957) [Link] (2 responses)

Autodetecting UTF-8 is pretty easy, since very few valid sequences are valid UTF-8. So UTF-8, fallback to locale encoding, is very effective. If a UTF-8 or UTF-16 BOM is present, it's also almost always right (though ugly).

When downloading web pages, detecting the encoding is very easy, the server gives it (if the server is wrong, it's not your editor's fault, and it will be right more often than not).

It's only when forced to choose between old legacy encodings (Latin 1 versus Latin 2, for example) that it becomes difficult-to-impossible to guess the encoding.

The final good solution is to assume everything is UTF-8 unless otherwise specified and force the last legacy users to migrate to something sane. This is often best on a multiuser system where LC_CTYPE won't apply outside the current user's /home resources.

Encoding in Kate

Posted Jun 13, 2006 14:29 UTC (Tue) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

The final good solution is to assume everything is UTF-8 unless otherwise specified and force the last legacy users to migrate to something sane.

Sounds a bit Orwellian to me. Even if you mostly succeed, a few people will still meet in abandoned building at the dead of night and read ASCII text...

Encoding in Kate

Posted Jun 13, 2006 14:44 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

People will use whatever works best for them. For me, it's latin-1 or ISO 8859-15. It is not a legacy encoding; it is completely sound if all you want is to write European characters. I'm fairly sure I will never mix any Chinese text in my web pages, and with ISO 8859-15 they seem to work best across editors and browsers.

This web page is written in ISO 8859-1; or so it says in the header:

CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"

so the character might not work. In fact it does work in Firefox, maybe because UTF-8 is really the charset used?

Encoding in Kate

Posted Jun 13, 2006 9:25 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

Note that I'm not suggesting to autodetect the encoding blindly, but based on the XML header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-15"?>

that appears as the first line of an XHTML file. Maybe the choice of word "autodetect" was unfortunate. The encoding in an XML document is declared and should be respected, right?

Encoding in Kate

Posted Jun 14, 2006 11:28 UTC (Wed) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link]

But kate part is no XML editor. It may have some plugins making work with XML files easier, but it's still a normal text editor that knows nothing about XML.

Gedit Review (Softpedia.com)

Posted Jun 16, 2006 20:53 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link]

Nope, here I see: 'a', 'o', and two '. With gedit, less, etc. xemacs and emacs show 'a???' and 'a<3 boxes>', respectively.

Gedit Review (Softpedia.com)

Posted Jun 13, 2006 19:58 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Gee, right the problem is probably in the X11 core fonts backend emacs insists in using years after everyone switched to fontconfig.

This *still* makes emacs guilty in my book. If an app purposefully chose not to switch from a broken backen, it's as guilty as if the brokeness where in its own code.

If there were no alternative to core fonts, now you could blame the backend.