[XeTeX] Emacs

[Philiрp Rеichmuth]

Am Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:17:02 +0100 schrieb Janusz S. Bień:
> On Fri, 19 Mar 2010  Peter Baker <psb6m at virginia.edu> wrote:
>> Emacs hasn't been Unicode-aware for a whole long time; 
> 
>   http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
> 
>   Emacs has quite good basic UTF-8 support starting from version 21.3
> 
> Emacs 21.3 was released on March 24, 2003.

Note that the word "basic" here really means *basic* UTF-8 support. I used
to use Unicode Emacs a lot, including a 150-page thesis with Arabic,
Cyrillic and extended Latin in Unicode+TeX, and there was quite a bit of
working around Emacs limitations. I'm on Windows, which may explain part of
the problems (it's still somewhat of a second-tier platform). 

For example Unicode copy & paste from the Windows Clipboard has only worked
since Emacs 23, released in July 2009. A text editor without a working
Clipboard can be a frustrating experience, I tell you. Some things still
don't work, such as right-to-left text out of the box (try entering Arabic)
or Unicode text input from some Windows input methods (works partially, for
the rest you have to use LEIM and write an Emacs input method). It's all
possible somehow, but you are potentially in for a bit of gnashing of
teeth.

Emacs is getting there, and there has been a lot of energy and coding
effort put into it. In general, however, both TeX and Emacs have been quite
a bit behind the curve. TeX still is in many ways (BibTeX comes to mind).
XeTeX is the big exception.

Philipp