[vox-tech] vim and utf-8 support (newbie alert)

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 04:06:01PM -0500, Jay Strauss wrote:
> You don't need vowels in Hebrew, you figure out the word by context :)

Of course, Peter, being Jewish, is quite aware of this... :)

OOC, Pete, are you planning on doing Hebrew homework or something like
that with vim?

One thing I have thoroughly enjoyed about Emacs w/Mule is the various
built-in "input methods", which automatically map keystrokes
appropriately. The Japanese support is *quite* good. However:

  1. To my knowledge, Emacs doesn't support right-to-left. At least,
     it certainly doesn't know to switch to right-to-left mode
     automatically when certain characters are used (this is required
     by Unicode). I tried typing some mixed English and Hebrew (sans
     vowels) in UTF-8 in an HTML page, but the Hebrew looked backwards
     (left-to-right) in Emacs. When I loaded the page in Mozilla,
     however, Mozilla knew how to handle the Hebrew characters and
     automatically displayed them right-to-left.

  2. I don't believe you can get the Hebrew vowels; but I haven't
     tried.

  3. Not all languages automatically support conversion to
     Unicode. For example, I can type in Japanese, and then attempt to
     export the text file, but unicode will not be one of the
     available encodings.

So, great for some things, not for others. But I still love the
Japanese input method. Coupled with the fact that I can use vm-mode to
read and write messages in Japanese to my friends overseas.

Doesn't help you much, though, does it? ;)

You might check out: 

  http://freshmeat.net/redir/yudit/12304/url_homepage/www.yudit.org

HTH,
Micah