Mule (21.4/5) french ç and oe

[Uwe Brauer]

>>>>> "Aidan" == Aidan Kehoe <kehoea at parhasard.net> writes:

   > Sounds good!


Ok, 
   > Yes. Its not being included in ISO 8859-1 led to a decrease in its
   > usage in French, though strictly speaking it is still obligatory,
   > there is a spelling distinction between œ and oe, and it is used in
   > formal printed matter.


   > Non-Mule XEmacs can’t handle literal œ. You’ll need to construct
   > the character at run time, in a similar way as the latin-9-pre
   > snippet in your other mail.


That surprised my very much 



   > Mule does support this character. It’s code point 61 in latin-iso8859-15,
   > corresponding to an octet value of #xBD in an ISO-8859-15-encoded file.

Ok but there is currently no *input* method, no? GNU emacs
supports it in latin-pre(post) and latin-9-pre(post)

And it is bound to

/o --> œ

While we have

/o --> °

In general 

/o --> ø


   > Quail should support this character. If GNU have decided on an input scheme
   > for it, I would suggest using that; otherwise, I think the following is
   > reasonable. 

   > Quail key sequence -> Inputted char
   > oe                 -> œ
   > oee                -> oe

To have oe --> œ was my original idea, however meanwhile that issue was
also discussed in the GNU emacs developers list and I was told that for
example coeffient uses oe not œ.  However oei and oeu should be œi and œu

One could think of 

  oei   -->œi
  œu    -->œu

But I am not sure, another idea would be to use

  "o--> œ


   >> X-symbol does not save this char as unicode or anything like this
   >> but as \oe.
   >> 
   >> -  ispell does not know how do spell this word soeur.

   > Ispell a) needs its dictionaries in an encoding that can handle œ;
   > UTF-8 probably and b) needs XEmacs to hand it text in that
   > encoding; probably using process-coding-system-alist, or, as a fall
   > back, the native encoding.

But I am not sure whether ispell support UTF8. Can you confirm this?
So if it does it would not be sufficient to set the coding system of
that file to utf8.

To summarise what about the idea to have 

 "o  --> œ en french prefix?

Uwe