🚀 go-pugleaf

Recently, we upgraded our equipment to SPARCs in my department.
With the new workstations came keyboards that allow full use
of the 8-bit character set ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1). This prompted
me to make the necessary modifications to Emacs to turn it into
an 8-bit character editor. In case there are others who are
interested in extending the capabilities of Emacs in this way,
and who are too impatient to wait for Emacs version 19, I include
below the diffs for the changes I've made.

These modifcations are mainly of interest to those that have
a workstation/terminal that can display Latin-1 characters,
as well as a keyboard that can be used to enter characters in
this extended set.

Some points of interest are:

	-- All characters in ISO 8859-1 are now considered normal
	   characters, and are entered and displayed in the usual way.
	   (Characters in the range 128..255 can also be displayed
	   as \xxx, by setting the variable meta-printable to nil.)
	   Commands like upcase-word, forward-word, etc. should
	   work as expected.

	-- Meta-commands are entered using either the ESC-prefix,
	   or the Meta-shift key in Emacstool or in Emacs
	   under X windows.

	-- Whether you use X windows or Sunview or some other
	   windowing system, make sure that you have a fixed width font
	   with a full character set. Many of the fonts in OpenWindows
	   that claim to be ISO 8859-1, are not! Also, some of
	   the fonts have accented characters that are too tall.

	-- Keymaps are extended to length 256.


Since Emacs's 7-bit dependency is hardwired into many different
places, there are undoubtledly cases that I have missed. However,
I have installed this modified version of Emacs on our Sun 3 and
SPARC workstations, and no major problems have surfaced yet.
Obviously, I take no responsibility for bugs or errors in this code,
nor for finding or correcting errors; as usual,

	this code comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.


Anders Edenbrandt
Department of Computer Science
Lund University
Box 118
S-221 00  Lund, Sweden

E-mail: Anders.Edenbrandt@dna.lth.se


The diffs have been posted to gnu.emacs.sources.