GNU Emacs NEWS -- history of user-visible changes. 2002-0705 Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end for copying conditions. Please send Emacs bug reports to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. For older news, see the file ONEWS Temporary note: +++ indicates that the appropriate manual has already been updated. --- means no change in the manuals is called for. When you add a new item, please add it without either +++ or --- so we will look at it * Changes in Emacs 22.1 ** The Emacs character set is now a superset of Unicode (it has about four times the code space, which should be plenty). The internal encoding used for buffers and strings is now Unicode-based and called `utf-8-emacs'. utf-8-emacs is backwards compatible with the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode. The `emacs-mule' coding system can still read and write data in the old internal encoding. There are still charsets which contain disjoint sets of characters where this is necessary or useful, especially for various Far Eastern sets which are problematic with Unicode. Since the internal encoding is also used by default for byte-compiled files -- i.e. the normal coding system for byte-compiled Lisp files is now utf-8-Emacs -- Lisp containing non-ASCII characters which is compiled by Emacs 22 can't be read by earlier versions of Emacs. Files compiled by Emacs 20 or 21 are loaded correctly as emacs-mule (whether or not they contain multibyte characters), which makes loading them somewhat slower than Emacs 22-compiled files. Thus it may be worth recompiling existing .elc files which don't need to be shared with older Emacsen. ** There are assorted new coding systems/aliases -- see M-x list-coding-systems. ** New charset implementation with many new charsets. See M-x list-character-sets. New charsets can be defined conveniently as tables of unicodes. The dimension of a charset is now 0, 1, 2, or 3, and the size of each dimension is no longer limited to 94 or 96. Generic characters no longer exist. A dynamic charset priority list is used to infer the charset of unicodes for display &c. ** The following facilities are obsolete: Minor modes: unify-8859-on-encoding-mode, unify-8859-on-decoding-mode * Lisp changes in Emacs 22.1 New functions: characterp, max-char, map-charset-chars, define-charset-alias, primary-charset, set-primary-charset, unify-charset, clear-charset-maps, charset-priority-list, set-charset-priority, define-coding-system, define-coding-system-alias, coding-system-aliases Changed functions: copy-sequence, decode-char, encode-char, set-fontset-font, new-fontset, modify-syntax-entry, define-charset, modify-category-entry Obsoleted: char-bytes, chars-in-region, set-coding-priority, char-valid-p * Incompatible Lisp changes Deleted functions: make-coding-system, register-char-codings, coding-system-spec ** The character codes for characters from the eight-bit-control/eight-bit-graphic charsets aren't now in the range 128-255. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright information: Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn. Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions, provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last changed them. Local variables: mode: outline paragraph-separate: "[ ]*$" end: