Re: Guidance concerning something I want to do with charsets

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> writes:

> On Wed, Nov 19 2008, Lloyd Zusman wrote:
>
>> [ ... ]
>>
>>
>>      if Content-Type specifies UTF-8
>>        use UTF-8 as the charset
>>      else
>>        use ISO-8859-1 as the charset
>
> That is the normal behavior of Gnus (and any other MIME-aware MUA).
> If you have problems with that, there's either a bug in your config
> (e.g. using Emacs in unibyte mode) or in Gnus.

Well, I have indeed been using Emacs in unibyte mode. Ages ago (well,
some time in the 1990's, I think), I started using that setting. Based
on what you're saying here, I guess that's obsolete.

I send emails to people who seem to be limited to unibyte ISO-8859-1
messages and not UTF-8. Perhaps their mailers are primitive and ignore
the Content-Type header ... I'm not sure why.  This is the reason for my
having set this default, originally.

I'm now trying to catch up on my knowledge of charsets, so please
forgive my ignorance about this topic. I can see from what you wrote
below that there's a way run Emacs in multibyte mode by default but to
use ISO-8859-1 for dealing with messages 


> I can't think of a common use case for the `nil' case beside incorrect
> charset labelling of articles (e.g. declaring iso-8859-1 when it is
> utf-8).  For this, you can use
> `gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist' and the numerical prefix for
> `g':

Yes, I do see incorrect charset labeling (or missing labeling
altogether) in some articles and email messages.

Is there a way to do this without the numerical prefix? I.e., some sort
of hook that I can use to match the sender or newsgroup against a
pattern and then force the buffer to be encoded via unibyte ISO-8859-1
if the pattern matches?


> ,----[ (info "(gnus)Paging the Article") ]
> | `A g'
> | `g'
> |      [ ... etc. ... ]
> `----
>
>> 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.
>
> Why do you think that this is useful?

Well, maybe the only reason I think this way is due to ignorance. Some
of the recipients of my email messages and readers of my newsgroup posts
(in a private, very small news server ... maybe 20 people) do not seem
to be able to read UTF-8 encodings. This is why I want to force
ISO-8859-1 when writing to these people or posting in that private
newsgroup, whether these are replies or whether I'm initiating the
message.


>> 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?
>
> Gnus already does The Right Thing by default.  You can specify which
> charsets to prefer via `mm-coding-system-priorities':


OK. I think I understand. I'll dig into this further, and I'll see if I
can fix my emacs so as not to use unibyte by default any longer, and
then to make use of the features you have described.

All that remains is for me to figure out how to write the hook that I
mentioned above.

Thank you very much.


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