From: handa@etlken.etl.go.jp (Kenichi Handa)
Subject: Mule -- A Multilingual Editor
Organization: Electrotechnical Lab., Japan.
Distribution: fj
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 11:32:26 GMT

	    Mule Beta Release Announcement

Now we are beta testing Mule (MULtilingual Enhancement to
GNU Emacs) and are trying to find "rugged" users who are
familiar with both GNU Emacs and one of the languages that
Mule can support.

Mule is a modified version of GNU Emacs 18.58, it is
distributed as a complete tar file or as a patch to 18.58.
Mule can support a larger set of characters sets, such as
Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Europeans.

Users who are familiar with Nemacs may easily start using
Mule.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@etl.go.jp

------- README.Mule ----------------------------------------
############################################################
	0. INTRODUCTION
	1. WHAT IS MULE
	2. SUPPORTED LANGUAGES
	3. SUPPORTED SYSTEMS
	4. INSTALLATION
	5. DOCUMENTS
	6. DISTRIBUTION
	7. MAILING LIST
############################################################

0. INTRODUCTION

This directory contains the distribution of Mule Ver.0.9.6 beta.

Mule is free software distributed either as patches to GNU Emacs
(18.58) or as a complete tar file.  You can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at
your option) any later version.

Mule is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License
for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING.  If not, write to the Free
Software Foundation, 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.


1. WHAT IS MULE?

Mule is a MULtilingual Enhancement to GNU Emacs.  It can
handle not only ASCII characters (7 bits) and ISO Latin-1 (8
bits), but also Japanese, Chinese, Korean (16 bits) coded in
the ISO2022 standard and its variants (e.g. EUC, Compound
Text).  For Chinese there is support for both GB and Big5.
A text buffer in Mule can contain a mixture of characters
from these languages.  To input any of these characters, you
can use various input methods provided by Mule itself.  In
addition, if you use Mule under some terminal emulator
(kterm, cxterm, or exterm), you can use any input methods
supported by the emulator.


2. SUPPORTED LANGUAGES

2.0 ENGLISH

Just type in. :-)

2.1 JAPANESE

It is strongly recommended to install Wnn4.108.  EGG system
bundled with Mule can communicate with jserver of Wnn and
provide you a very convenient Japanese inputting method.
See 'doc/EGG' for the usage of this system.
You can run Mule as a client of X window, or run it under
some Japanese terminal (including such emulators as kterm and
exterm).  In the latter case, you can use any inputting
methods supported by the terminal.
Among other inputting methods are:
	EGG-SJ3, CANNA (bundled with Mule)
	SKK, boiled-egg (in 'contrib' directory)

2.2 CHINESE

It is strongly recommended to install Wnn4.108.  EGG system
bundled with Mule can communicate with cserver of cWnn and
provide you a very convenient Chinese (GB) inputting method.
See 'doc/EGG' for the usage of this system.
You can run Mule as a client of X window, or run it under
some Chinese terminal (including such emulators as cxterm and
exterm).  In the latter case, you can use any inputting
methods supported by the terminal.

QUAIL system (bundled with Mule) also provides several
inputting methods for:
	GB: PINYIN, PINYIN_with_TONE, CCDOSPY, SW
	Big5: PINYIN, ETZY, ZOZY
See 'doc/QUAIL' for the usage of this system.

Subscribers of alt.chinese.text will find it very useful to
use GNUS (news reader written in Emacslisp) with hz2gb.el
(in 'contrib/lisp.tar.Z').  It encodes/decodes HZ/zW
encoding to/from Mule internal code automatically.

2.3 KOREAN

Korean inputting method is provided by QUAIL system (bundled
with Mule).  See 'doc/QUAIL' for the usage of this system.
You can run Mule as a client of X window, or run it under
Hangul terminal or exterm.

2.4 EUROPEAN

Many kinds of European character inputting methods are
provided by QUAIL system (bundled with Mule).  For the
moment, QUAIL provides inputting methods for:
	Latin1, Latin2,.. Latin5, Greek (ISO8859-7),
	Hebrew (ISO8859-8), Cyrillic (ISO8859-5)
See 'doc/QUAIL' for the usage of this system.
As for Hebrew, however, right-to-left writing is not yet
supported.  Please wait for the next version.

2.5 OTHER LANGUAGES

In the next version, we'll support Thai and Vietnamese.
Arabic and Devanagali are also in our target, but we don't
know if we can support them by the next version.  We may
need more time.


3. SUPPORTED SYSTEMS

Basically, Mule runs on any systems (and machines) on which
GNU Emacs runs.  In addition, several systems (including
MS-DOS) are supported.  See etc/MACHINES.


4. INSTALLATION

To install Mule, see INSTALL.Mule.


5. DOCUMENTS

For the moment, we have the following documents.
'etc' directory contains:
	FAQ (for original GNU Emacs in English)
	FAQ.jp (for original GNU Emacs in Japanese)
	FAQ.Mule (for Mule in English)
	FAQ.Mule.jp (for Mule in Japanese)
	emacs.1 (man file for original GNU Emacs in English)
	mule.1 (man file for Mule in English)
'info' directory contains:
	emacs (for original GNU Emacs in English)
	mule-jp (for Mule in Japanese)
	egg-jp (for EGG in Japanese)
	canna-jp (for CANNA in Japanese)
You may also find various documents under 'doc' directory.
Especially, please refer 'doc/TERMINOLOGY' if you find
unknown terms.  Novice users may have to read 'doc/X11',
'doc/EGG', and 'doc/QUAIL'.

The file NEWFEATURE is also very important.

Since many of these documents (including this file) were
written by a non-native speaker of English (it's me), you
may find many curious expressions.  Please correct them.  In
addition, we are looking for volunteers who translate the
documents to Chinese, Korean, and the other langauges.


6. DISTRIBUTION

Mule is available by anonymous ftp from:

	etlport.etl.go.jp [192.31.197.99]:/pub/mule
	sh.wide.ad.jp [133.4.11.11]:/JAPAN/mule
	ftp.funet.fi [128.214.6.100]:/pub/gnu/emacs/mule

If you are accessing from out of Japan, please use the one
of the last two sites.  For Europeans, the last site is
probably the best.  Either ftp the complete tar file
(mule-0.9.6.tar.Z), *or* if you have an unmodified GNU Emacs
18.58 you can ftp just the patch file (diff-18.58-0.9.6.Z)
and apply that.  If you find a patch with version number
higher than 0.9.6, apply that also.

These directories contain several other useful files such as
X's fonts and contributed softwares.  See the file '00README'.

We are looking for ftp sites out of Japan.  If you can
kindly provide this service, please send mail to
handa@etl.go.jp.

If you can't get Mule by ftp, please send request to
mule-request@etl.go.jp.  We send you patches by mail.


7. MAILING LIST

We are running two mailing lists:
	mule@etl.go.jp (main language: English)
	mule-jp@etl.go.jp (main language: Japanese)
All mails to mule@etl.go.jp are also sent to
mule-jp@etl.go.jp.

We ask everyone who gets Mule to join one of these
mailing-list.  Please send requests of
subscribing/unsubscribing to:
	mule-request@etl.go.jp
saying which mailing list you want to join.

Note that you can use other languages than 'main' on both
lists.  You can read/write any languages by Mule.

At last, we are deeply grateful to the current members of
mailing lists for their cooperation.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA  Electrotechnical Lab., JAPAN.  <handa@etl.go.jp>
Satoru TOMURA   Electrotechnical Lab., JAPAN.  <tomura@etl.go.jp>
Mikiko NISIKIMI Electrotechnical Lab., JAPAN.  <nisikimi@etl.go.jp>