Mail Archives: djgpp/2002/02/10/06:30:04
>I believe that the comments about the ability of the DOS terminal
>to display Latin-1 or Cyrillic are overstated. Certainly with a
>default setup, this is true, but it is easy to add Latin-1 (codepage
>819) or Cyrillic (codepage 915 = ISO 8859-5) support with the free
>iso codepage package from Kosta Kostis. This requires a VGA or SVGA
>display and the use of the DISPLAY.SYS driver. With this in place
>the codepage can be changed on the fly for any program that allows
>shelling out to DOS. See:
"http://www.kostis.net/freeware/isocp101.zip"
or
"http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/doc/ISO/charsets/isocp101.zip"
Doug
>Doug Kaufman
I'm certainly curious to download and try this, even if I can only see only one
codepage at a time. Last night I looked through DR-DOS 7.03 DOSBOOK about
switching codepages, never having done that so far in DOS, and found that many
more than two codepages could be loaded on boot, tough only one could be active
at one time. In OS/2 Warp 4, only two codepages could be loaded on boot. I
noticed a Russian codepage 866 as well as various European codepages. Maybe
DOS Lynx386 will be able to display those lower-case e-acute-accents correctly
and not as lower-case Greek theta? OS/2 Warp 4 didn't support ISO-8859-1, even
in the Enhanced Editor (EPM), which ran in Presentation Manager GUI as opposed
to text mode.
Now from Eli Zaretskii:
> This still allows only one character set at any given time. For
example, if you have a buffer in Latin-1 and another in Cyrillic,
you'd need to switch the codepage each time you switch the buffer.
What if you want both buffers displayed at the same time in two
different windows? What if you want to mix them in the same buffer?
> Emacs lets you do all that without any extra codepages, and without
switching them, albeit for a price of reduced legibility in some of
the languages.
> Will those work in a Windows DOS box? I doubt that.
> Besides, asking people to mess with their system's display drivers is
not my idea of seamless package installation. I've chosen the
specific method used by Emacs for supporting multiple character sets
because it doesn't require _anything_ from the user, as far as the
system setup is concerned. I did consider using SVGA features for
nicer support of fonts (Emacs could generate characters itself,
without any need for external codepages), but dropped the idea after
learning that this won't work on Windows. With most DJGPP users
working mostly on Windows these days, it just didn't make sense to
spend my time on a feature that 90% of users won't ever benefit from.
Not working in a Windows DOS box should not be an issue, since there is a Win32
port of Emacs, and Xemacs too, which would be fuller-featured than DOS Emacs,
having the Windows GUI or XFree86 Win32 port, and better support of long file
names and multitasking. So why would Windows-based DJGPP users prefer the DOS
port of Emacs over the Win32 port, except perhaps for testing purposes? Or am I
missing something?
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