View source for MULE

{{short description|Computer software}}
{{other uses|Mule (disambiguation)}}
The '''MULtilingual Enhancement''' ('''MULE''') is computer software which adds extra [[written language]] characters to the [[GNU Emacs]] text editor and programming environment.

MULE provides facilities to handle text written in many languages (at least 42 [[character set]]s, 53 coding sets, 128 input methods, and 58 languages<ref name="aist"/>), and multilingual texts containing several languages in the same buffer. This goes beyond the simple facilities offered by [[Unicode]] to represent multilingual text.  MULE also supports input methods, composing display using fonts in various encodings, changing character syntax and other editing facilities to correspond to local language usage, and more.

MULE was originally based on Nemacs, a version of Emacs extended to handle [[Japanese language|Japanese]], released in 1987.  Development stalled, and the effort to incorporate increased language functionality into the main Emacs version stalled, until the [[Fork (software development)|fork]] between [[Lucid Inc.]] and the [[Free Software Foundation]] (FSF) led to [[XEmacs]], which for several years boasted considerably better support for multiple languages and character sets.  This competition reinvigorated development of GNU Emacs's language handling abilities and prompted the inclusion of MULE in version 21 of GNU Emacs.

MULE was written by the researchers Satoru Tomura, Ken'ichi Handa, Mikiko Nishikimi, and Naoto Takahashi, of the [[National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology]] (AIST), which is a part of [[Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry]] (METI), of the [[government of Japan]].<ref name="aist">[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1173098 "Open source software research activities in AIST towards secure open systems"], by Kazuhito Ohmaki, in ''Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Symposium on High Assurance Systems Engineering'' (HASE'02), p. 37-, 2002 {{ISBN|0-7695-1769-2}}. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, D.C.</ref>  This made it impossible for the developers to assign copyright to FSF, as is usually done for contributions to GNU packages.<ref>[http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2000-09/msg00065.html Re: VM and the FSF]</ref>

== See also ==
* {{Portal-inline|Free and open-source software}}

==References==
{{Reflist}}
== Further reading ==
{{refbegin}}
* {{cite book|title=Red Hat Linux Unleashed|author1-first=Kamran|author1-last=Husain|author2-first=Tim|author2-last=Parker|publisher=Sams|year=1996|isbn=9780672309625|page=131}}
{{refend}}

==External links==
* {{Official website|savannah.nongnu.org/projects/mule}}
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20060103130616/http://www.m17n.org/mule/history.en.html MULE history]
* [http://ftp.kaist.ac.kr/hangul/mirror/mule/READMEDIR/FAQ-Mule MULE FAQ]

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