changeset 33745:78ec4a7ba765

(Undisplayable Characters): New node. Tweaks elsewhere.

--- a/man/mule.texi	Wed Nov 22 13:55:24 2000 +0000
+++ b/man/mule.texi	Wed Nov 22 14:04:22 2000 +0000
@@ -56,6 +56,7 @@
 * Fontsets::                Fontsets are collections of fonts
                               that cover the whole spectrum of characters.
 * Defining Fontsets::       Defining a new fontset.
+* Undisplayable Characters:: When characters don't display.
 * Single-Byte Character Support::
                             You can pick one European character set
                             to use without multibyte characters.
@@ -80,7 +81,8 @@
 @file{etc/HELLO}, which shows how to say ``hello'' in many languages.
 This illustrates various scripts.  If the font you're using doesn't have
 characters for all those different languages, you will see some hollow
-boxes instead of characters; see @ref{Fontsets}.
+boxes instead of characters; see @ref{Fontsets}.  On non-windowing
+displays, @samp{?} is displayed in place of the hollow box.
 
 @findex list-charset-chars
 @cindex characters in a certain charset
@@ -187,7 +189,7 @@
 current when you use this command, because the effects apply globally to
 the Emacs session.  The supported language environments include:
 
-@cindex euro sign
+@cindex Euro sign
 @quotation
 Chinese-BIG5, Chinese-CNS, Chinese-GB, Cyrillic-ALT, Cyrillic-ISO,
 Cyrillic-KOI8, Czech, Devanagari, English, Ethiopic, German, Greek,
@@ -208,6 +210,7 @@
 @findex set-locale-environment
 @vindex locale-language-names
 @vindex locale-charset-language-names
+@cindex locales
   Some operating systems let you specify the language you are using by
 setting the locale environment variables @env{LC_ALL}, @env{LC_CTYPE},
 and @env{LANG}; the first of these which is nonempty specifies your
@@ -433,7 +436,7 @@
 through 0377 (octal) are not really legitimate in the buffer.  The valid
 non-ASCII printing characters have codes that start from 0400.
 
-  If you type a self-inserting character in the invalid range 0240
+  If you type a self-inserting character in the range 0240
 through 0377, Emacs assumes you intended to use one of the ISO
 Latin-@var{n} character sets, and converts it to the Emacs code
 representing that Latin-@var{n} character.  You select @emph{which} ISO
@@ -447,7 +450,12 @@
 If you do not specify a choice, the default is Latin-1.
 
   The same thing happens when you use @kbd{C-q} to enter an octal code
-in this range.
+in this range.  If you enter a code in the range 0200 through 0237,
+which forms the @code{eight-bit-control} character set, it is inserted
+literally.  You should normally avoid doing this since buffers
+containing such characters have to be written out in either the
+@code{emacs-mule} or @code{raw-text} coding system, which is usually not
+what you want.
 
 @node Coding Systems
 @section Coding Systems
@@ -830,7 +838,8 @@
 Emacs knows which characters the terminal can actually handle.
 
   By default, output to the terminal is not translated at all, unless
-Emacs can deduce the proper coding system from your terminal type.
+Emacs can deduce the proper coding system from your terminal type or
+your locale specification (@pxref{Language Environments}).
 
 @kindex C-x RET k
 @findex set-keyboard-coding-system
@@ -923,7 +932,8 @@
 course, Emacs fontsets can use only the fonts that the X server
 supports; if certain characters appear on the screen as hollow boxes,
 this means that the fontset in use for them has no font for those
-characters.
+characters.@footnote{The installation instructions have information on
+additional font support.}
 
   Emacs creates two fontsets automatically: the @dfn{standard fontset}
 and the @dfn{startup fontset}.  The standard fontset is most likely to
@@ -1077,6 +1087,27 @@
 
   @xref{Font X}, for more information about font naming in X.
 
+@node Undisplayable Characters
+@section Undisplayable Characters
+
+Your terminal may not be able to display some non-@sc{ascii} characters.
+Most non-windowing terminals can only use a single character set,
+specified by the variable @code{default-terminal-coding-system}
+(@pxref{Specify Coding}) and characters which can't be encoded in it are
+displayed as @samp{?} by default.  Windowing terminals may not have the
+necessary font available to display a given character and display a
+hollow box instead.  You can change the default behavior.
+
+If you use Latin-1 characters but your terminal can't display Latin-1,
+you can arrange to display mnemonic @sc{ascii} sequences instead, e.g.@:
+@samp{"o} for o-umlaut.  Load the library @file{iso-ascii} to do this.
+
+If your terminal can display Latin-1, you can display characters from
+other European character sets using a mixture of equivalent Latin-1
+characters and @sc{ascii} mnemonics.  Use the Custom option
+@code{latin1-display} to enable this.  The mnemonic @sc{ascii} sequences
+mostly correspond to those of the prefix input methods.
+
 @node Single-Byte Character Support
 @section Single-byte Character Set Support