12.9 Mule as a multiplexed charset
This version of
Recode barely starts supporting multiplexed or
super-charsets, that is, those encoding methods by
which a single text stream may contain a
combination of more than one constituent charset.
The only multiplexed charset in Recode is
Mule, and even then, it is only very
partially implemented: the only correspondence
available is with Latin-1. The author
fastly implemented this only because he needed this
for himself. However, it is intended that Mule
support to become more real in subsequent releases
of Recode.
Multiplexed
charsets are not to be confused with mixed charset
texts (see Mixed). For mixed
charset input, the rules allowing to distinguish
which charset is current, at any given place, are
kind of informal, and driven from the semantics of
what the file contains. On the other side,
multiplexed charsets are designed to be
interpreted fairly precisely, and quite
independently of any informational context.
The spelling
Mule originally stands for
multilingual
enhancement to GNU Emacs, it
is the result of a collective effort orchestrated
by Handa Ken'ichi since 1993. When
Mule got rewritten in the main
development stream of GNU Emacs 20, the FSF renamed
it MULE, meaning
multilingual
environment in GNU Emacs.
Even if the charset Mule is meant to
stay internal to GNU Emacs, it sometimes breaks
loose in external files, and as a consequence, a
recoding tool is sometimes needed. Within Emacs,
Mule comes with Leim,
which stands for libraries of
emacs
input
methods. One of these
libraries is named quail1.
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