Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-m17n (69 mails)

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@xxxxxxx>]

Wolfgang Slany <wsi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Is there some way to *edit* a latex file (using xemacs?) containing both
> German umlauts etc. (directly, that is, using
> \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} and seeing them as they are usually written,
> not as "a etc.)  and Japanese characters at the same time?

I suggest to use UTF-8 for this purpose[1].

I'll explain in the next mail how to use UTF-8 for German and Japanese
in LaTeX.

In this mail, first some remarks about editors you can use to edit
UTF-8 encoded files on SuSE Linux:

Yes, you can use XEmacs for that purpose.

To do that, you need to install the extension package
mule-ucs-xemacs.rpm[2].

Then add

    (if (locate-library "un-define") (require 'un-define))

to your ~/.xemacs/init.el[3].

To specify UTF-8 encoding while loading a file into XEmacs use:

    C-x RET c utf-8 RET C-x C-f filename RET

(With XEmacs you can also use 'C-u C-x C-f filename RET', but not with
Emacs). If you don't want to type that all the time when loading the
file, add a coding system cookie to the first line of the file:

    -*- coding: utf-8 -*- 

> Is there some other editor for linux that can do this? I would
> prefer xemacs, but if it does not work for some reason, we will
> settle for another one.

   - GNU Emacs (needs mule-ucs.rpm). 
   - Vim
   - yudit
   - mined
   - kedit (and other KDE editors)[4]
   - probably there are others ...

Footnotes: 

[1]  There are other possibilities to use CJK-LaTeX with with German
and Japanese both written directly into the text, see the
documentation of cjk-enc.el:

    /usr/share/doc/packages/cjk-latex/doc/cjk-enc.doc

(contained in cjk-latex.rpm). But if you use cjk-enc.el, you will have
your files encoded in an (X)Emacs specific mule encoding, which is
much less portable than UTF-8, for example you cannot edit your text
with other editors anymore if you use mule encoding. Using UTF-8 is
probably a much better idea.

[2] the updated XEmacs in

    ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mfabian/8.0-i386/

already contain Mule-UCS, you don't need to install mule-ucs-xemacs
anymore if you are using these updated XEmacs packages. In that case
it is sufficient to have

    (if (locate-library "un-define") (require 'un-define))

in your ~/.xemacs/init.el.

[3] if you are using the default ~/.xemacs/init.el on
SuSE Linux 8.0, you already have that. 

[4] if you want to edit UTF-8 encoded files with kedit,
you have to start it with LC_CTYPE set to an UTF-8 locale, e.g.

    LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 kedit 

there is no option to select the encoding in kedit, you can only
select the encoding via LC_CTYPE when starting kedit. This is probably
true for the other KDE editors as well. Vim defaults to UTF-8 if you
start it in an UTF-8 locale, but you do not absolutely have to use an
UTF-8 locale to edit UTF-8 encoded files with Vim (see the Vim
documentation).

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@xxxxxxx>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。