3. Handling Foreign Languages

3.1 A file is shown corrupted. How do I read it?
3.2 Meadow displays white squares. What are these?
3.3 What languages are supported in Meadow?
3.4 Some languages are written from right to left. Does Meadow support such languages?
3.5 What kinds of coding systems are related to Meadow? And when are they used?
3.6 I want to use EUC for displaying Japanese, Chinese, Korean, EC, etc. simultaneously.
3.7 How can I input characters other than ASCII in isearch?
3.8 Where can I get various fonts for various languages?
3.9 How can I print out various languages?
3.10 Meadow wrongly determines the eol-type when it reads a file in.

3.1 A file is shown corrupted. How do I read it?

Open that file with specifying coding-system: C-x RET c CODING-SYSTEM COMMAND. For example, when you want to open a file with specifying euc-jp: C-x RET c euc-jp C-x C-f FILENAME.

When the file is already opened, C-x C-v will be useful instead of C-x C-f. (See section 3.5 What kinds of coding systems are related to Meadow? And when are they used?)

3.2 Meadow displays white squares. What are these?

These are characters which are not properly displayed because their font is not set. You can read them if you adequately configure fonts.

3.3 What languages are supported in Meadow?

• English
• Japanese
• Chinese
• Korean
• European languages
• Thai
• Vietnamese

3.4 Some languages are written from right to left. Does Meadow support such languages?

No. Because Mule 4.1, which is the base of Meadow, does not support, though Mule 2.3 partially supported.

3.5 What kinds of coding systems are related to Meadow? And when are they used?

You can get list of supported coding systems by command list-coding-systems. Also with Meadow 1.10 or above, you can use Mule-UCS to handle UTF-8/UTF-16.

3.6 I want to use EUC for displaying Japanese, Chinese, Korean, EC, etc. simultaneously.

This is impossible, because EUC for each language is the same coding system. Use iso-2022-jp-2 or *ctext* to display multi-lingual texts.

3.7 How can I input characters other than ASCII in isearch?

Unfortunately, you can't do it in IME without modification, but you can do it by using LEIM. LEIM comes with Meadow 1.10 and above version.

If you are using IME, this can be done by following things. First, Put

(define-key isearch-mode-map "\C-k" 'isearch-edit-string)

in your `.emacs'. Then, by hitting C-k during i-search, you can input non-ascii characters by IME.

3.8 Where can I get various fonts for various languages?

First you should get multilingual fonts. Meadow can use TrueType fonts and BDF fonts.

• To use TrueType fonts

  TrueType fonts installed to your Windows (via Windows Update or so) are also available from Meadow, as Meadow detects such fonts and registers as fontsets. Meadow can display Chinese (GB, Big5), Japanese, Korean, and European languages.

• To use BDF fonts

  BDF fonts are used for X Window System. To use BDF fonts in Meadow, first you should get intlfonts or intlfonts-split via GNU mirrors. See README.Meadow to configure BDF fonts. See section 6. Display

3.9 How can I print out various languages?

Use multibyte-enabled `ps-print.el' comes with latest Meadow and BDF font, to produce PostScript file from multilingual buffer. Then you could print out the PostScript file with Ghostscript. Meadow itself has no support for printing out (yet). See section 1.20 Can I print out in Meadow?

3.10 Meadow wrongly determines the eol-type when it reads a file in.

The current version of Meadow guesses the eol-type when it first encounters a CR/LF/CR+LF. This means if a CR is placed at the end of a `LF terminated' line, that file is regarded as ....-dos. You should explicitly specify the eol-type such as junet-dos/junet-unix/junet-mac by C-x RET c CODING-SYSTEM C-x C-f (M-x universal-coding-system-argument CODING-SYSTEM M-x find-file) when you read such ambiguous files.