Subject: Re: [[email-masked]: Emacs 20.2 tries to write out of addr space on Windows 95]

From: Andrew Innes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 13:14:58 GMT

On Thu, 23 Oct 1997 21:21:04 -0600, Richard Stallman <[email-masked]> said:
>    Yes, I've run 20.2 a little bit.  It's not that it doesn't run or work
>    (it does, at least in English locales); rather some of the MULE features
>    (most notably display but probably also input methods)
>
>Why would input methods in general require a lot of change?  They are
>mostly written in Lisp, and should be portable.

Ah, okay.  I wasn't sure about that (I haven't looked at leim yet).  I
had thought some of them were X-based programs.

>    but people
>    will surely want to use native Windows fonts as well, and indeed native
>    input methods where available (eg. on CJK systems).
>
>I am not sure this is really the better way.  Partly because it is
>good to make this portable, and partly because the "native" input
>methods may not fit in well with Emacs and its ways of handling input
>methods, and partly because they are probably proprietary.
>
>If they require very little change in Emacs, much as supporting X's
>Compose Character feature takes very little change in Emacs, then we
>might as well support them, but in that case it would be easy to do.

Localized versions of Windows included input method editors (if
appropriate) as a standard part of the operating system - in that sense
they are not proprietary.  Application developers can choose the degree
to which the IME appears to be a seamless part of the application; the
basic level is that the IME is like a separate process, which requires
no cooperation from the application.

I don't know at the moment how much work would be involved in having
closer integration, and whether closer integration would "fit" well with
the Emacs style.  Certainly I will not be looking at the possibility of
using native input methods until the font display issues are resolved.

AndrewI

---

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 21:21:04 -0600

but people