Re: naive charset question

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

I wrote:
> That come through fine for me, although if I try to quote the
> non-ASCII characters in a reply, again I get asked for a charset and
> the default behavior is to send a one-part us-ascii message.  Does
> quoting in a reply work for you, or sending the HELLO text, as opposed
> to actually entering the characters as input?

I found it!  An old part of my .emacs code invoked

  (standard-display-european 1)

which is described as

    Semi-obsolete way to toggle display of ISO 8859 European characters...

but in fact appears to be actively detrimental in some cases.  The
docs say that when it's called non-interactively (as in my case), it
selects unibyte mode for all buffers, and selects the Latin-1 language
environment.  But MML didn't even try to send out the message as
Latin-1, it just prompted and defaulted to ASCII.  Even so, if I got
BIG5 characters into my message buffer and displaying properly, MML
ought to be able to figure out what they are.

Removing that call does seem to fix my problem.  I can even send much
of the HELLO message, although it complains about devanagari being an
invalid coding system, and offhand I don't know the right way to find
out what text it's complaining about.  (I worked it out by M-x
apropos, noting that it reported "indian-glyph-code-offset" in the
plist, and deleting any text from that general part of the world, and
a few others.  But that shouldn't be how I have to work it out.)

Ken