Hi, I'm Minero Aoki. This is my first mail in this mailling list.
I propose new feature for RD.

Now RD can contain only the one 
If there is only Japanese document in ruby source code, it will
cause trouble in non-Japanese environment. But, we (Japanese user)
strongly want to use Japanese in documents.

Then I propose the way to include more than one charset in RD
document. The method is 4 step:

(1) a writer writes "raw-RD" in English, and/or his own language
(2) a writer encode "raw-RD" into "encoded-RD"
(3) a reader decode encoded-RD
((4)) a reader convert RD to html/tex/man/plain/...

for example, raw RD is:

=begin

= hello.rb

== about hello.rb
Copyright (c) 1999,2000 Minero Aoki

== Install
copy hello.rb to your ruby directory.

=begin
(same contents in Japanese)

=end


The RD encoder encode this. "encoded-rd" is like this:

=begin rd-header
Encoding-Alias: en=iso-8859, plain; ja=iso-2022-jp, base64;
=end

=begin rd encoding=en
(discription in English...)

=begin rd encoding=ja
(discription in Japanese. this part is encoded by base64)

=end


Too many "=begin" means parallel contents.
The contents from first "=begin" to second "=begin" is introduction
of hello.rb written with iso-8859 encoding, and the one from second
"=begin" to "=end" is same contents written with iso-2022-jp encoding.

You may think this is too complecated, and/or decrease RD's visibility.
But both writer and reader need not encode/decode document by his
hand. RD writer can encode his documents when he pack his software.
For example, he can do encoding in Makefile.
A reader, who is user of some package, can decode RD when he do
"make install" (or setup.rb). If he doesn't need some charset
(ex. iso-2022-jp charset for English user), he can simply erase it.


How do you think this?
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Minero Aoki