--------------------------
4. How Freemacs MULE works
--------------------------
This multilingual environment is aimed
first of all at American First Nation Languages, but I have included some basic
charsets as latin1 (Western Europe), latin2 (Central and
In this way, a text in, say, Russian,
written with Freemacs, should be properly rendered by other text editors as
well, provided that the correct encoding is set.
For American First Nation Languages, on the
other hand, I have tried to define some new "codepages". These
encodings won't work with other text editors or word processors (they will work
if you load the font file with gnuchcp2: for example, to load Inuktitut
syllabary, which is specified by the "afn3" encoding, enter
gnuchcp3
%EMACS%mule\fonts\afn3.dat
before you
invoke the editor, and
gnuchcp3
%EMACS%mule\fonts\afn3.dat
PS files should be properly printed by
every PostScript printer, and displayed correctly by every PS viewer such as
GhostView, because print2ps embeds a font dictionary into the text, building it
from the bitmaps stored in the .dat file. If you have GNU GhostScript (which is
available for many platforms, including DOS), you'll be able to make a PDF from
the PS file, and this PDF should show the correct glyphs everywhere (only, this
PDF won't be of a very high quality because of
the bitmap
fonts).
Every .dat file in the set is associated to
a keyboard driver with extension .key, and with a similar name. I have used
three or four character names for the .dat files.
The .key files are ASCII text files to be
used by XKEYB. Their name starts with the .dat file name, followed by a
"_", and a further two-letter
code which identifies the keyboard installed, and finally the .key
extension.
Finally, every .key file has an associated
text file with the same name and extension .map. Such a file contains a list of
the key bindings for the corresponding keyboard driver. Have a look at this file
to find out which keys to hit in order to get the characters you want. Hence,
for an Italian keyboard, you will have:
|
FONTS |
KEYBOARDS |
MAPPINGS |
|
cyr1.dat grk.dat etc. |
cyr1_it.key grk_it.key |
cyr1_it.map (cyr1_it.ps) grk_it.txt (grk_it.ps) |
In this package, I have provided .key files
for US, SP and IT keyboards, but if you have another keyboard installed in your
DOS, you can easily make your own keyboard driver with MAKEKEYB
(downloadable
from my web page). Please note that, having an Italian keyboard, I couldn't
test the
Of course, if you are not satisfied with
the mapping I provide, you can make your own driver with MAKEKEYB (for example,
if you already have a Russian keyboard, you probably will want to use the
mapping you are accustomed to, rather than the US-, IT- or SP-keyboard
compliant).
(Please note that keyboard mappings and
encoding are independent of each other. In the Cyrillic fonts provided here,
for example, a Cyrillic uppercase "A" is encoded as ASCII 176,
irrespectively of which key a keyboard driver binds that character to).
MULE directory tree:
|
%EMACS%MULE |
MULE main
directory. Contains .exe and .ed files, the .ps template file, and
COPYING.TXT |
|
%EMACS%MULE\SRC |
Contains
mint and PASCAL sources. |
|
%EMACS%MULE\DOC |
Contains
.txt files for documentation. |
|
%EMACS%MULE\KEY |
Contains
the keyboard drivers. |
|
%EMACS%MULE\FONTS |
Contains
the bitmaps. |
|
%EMACS%MULE\MAPPINGS |
Contains
the .map files. |