Guidance concerning something I want to do with charsets

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

I've been using gnus since it first came out, but during all this time,
I never did a whole lot with charsets. I just used to always cause it to
post in 7-bit ascii, and then later, I converted it to handle 8-bit
ascii and the ISO-8859-1 charset for when I'm composing messages in
Spanish.

However, now I'm thinking that I want to enter the 21st century with
regard to charsets, and I really don't know much about the topic, at
least with regard to emacs and gnus. I have a specific setup that I'd
like to implement in gnus, and I'm wondering if anyone here would be
willing to give me some initial guidance as to how to proceed.

I'm not looking for someone to solve my problem for me or write my code;
rather, I'm just hoping that I could be given a very general overview of
what I need to do, with some pointers to the appropriate docs. I'll do
the rest.

I'm using emacs 23.0.60.1 and gnus version "No Gnus v0.11", recently
obtained via CVS.

OK, here's what I want to accomplish:

1. For each group that I'm viewing in gnus, I'd like to associate a
   default charset. Initially, this will either be UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1,
   with the default being ISO-8859-1. I believe that I make this
   group-specific setting via the `charset' attribute of the Group
   Parameters, correct?  But I'm not sure where to set the default
   charset that will be used if I don't set this group parameter.

2. For each group that I'm viewing, I want to set my own variable which
   specifies whether or not the logic in Item 3 (see below) will be
   performed for that group. This variable would either be set to `t' or
   `nil' for each group. Should I set this user-specific variable in the
   Group Parameters, or is there some other mechanism that I should use?

3. This is the part that I know the least about. If the variable
   described in Item 2 is `nil', then the logic described here is not
   performed. However, if this variable is set to `t' for a given group,
   then I want gnus to look at the Content-Type header of all incoming
   messages in this group, and to use it as the charset for displaying
   each of these messages. However, I want to make use of the following
   specific logic (pseudo-code):

     if Content-Type specifies UTF-8
       use UTF-8 as the charset
     else
       use ISO-8859-1 as the charset

4. In all cases, the charset selected via Items 1, 2, and 3 should be
   used both for decoding the message for display *and* for encoding my
   replies and follow-ups. I don't know much about how to do this,
   either.
   
Is this a common set of tasks which are easy to perform in gnus, or am I
trying to do something that is as idiosyncratic as many of the other
tasks that I tend to want to perform?

Thanks for any guidance and pointers that any of you might be able to
offer me.


-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com
 God bless you.