Christophe Rhodes csr21@cam.ac.uk writes:
Maybe -- but, unless I read Helmut's work wrongly, it's also the only way of communicating the full space of characters to Emacs -- that is, Helmut's message strongly implied to me that current released versions of the emacsen do not support utf-8 communications in any useful way. Is this correct?
I was wrong. According to the NEWS file the utf-8 coding system was already present in Emacs 21.1., i.e. the first release of the 21 series. Sorry, for the confusion.
I don't know what the exact state in the XEmacs world is. My XEmacs 21.4 here had neither utf-8 nor emacs-mule support. But as Daniel said, utf-8 can be added with the mule-ucs package. I just tried it and it worked painlessly under Debian. mule-ucs works even for Emacs20.
One difference I observed between emacs-mule and utf-8 was that the same CL character can be mapped to different Emacs characters. E.g. in Allegro #\greek_small_letter_lamda (no, that's not a typo :) with char-code #x3bb, can be displayed as #x513bb or #xd34b. With my fonts, the glyph for the latter is a bit wider than a normal character. No idea what that means, though.
Helmut.