Re: naive charset question

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

I wrote:
> I didn't find much in the documentation to indicate why my naive
> assumption might actually be wrong.  In ognus-0.06, message.texi says
> very little about charsets and encoding except "here's how you specify
> your choice",

Oops.  That's not quite true.

I overlooked the reference to emacs-mime.texi in the description of
message-default-charset; I think it was the fact that it was in a
parenthetical remark, suggesting that the use of
message-default-charset was the normal case and the MULE bit was not,
and that once upon a time non-MULE Emacs *was* the normal case, that
led me to unconsciously dismiss it.  My bad.

Even so, the charset descriptions in emacs-mime are somewhat more
encouraging, but they seem to suggest that Emacs should take the
"HELLO" data, and if it can't encode it all as UTF-8, pull it apart
into separate MIME parts that can be encoded with available charsets.
Which sounds like it's probably exactly the right thing.  But it
didn't happen.

I even tried breaking it into separate parts myself, adding a bunch of
"#part" MML tags to the buffer (type="text/plain",
disposition=inline), with "#multipart" around the whole thing, and all
I got for my trouble was lots of prompts for the charset instead of
just one.  (Is it safe to use those magic #-sequences in <> brackets
in an MML Message buffer when they're supposed to be literal and not
MML tags?)  I assume each prompt was for a different part, but I got
no indication which part a given prompt might have been related to.

Is there some special library code I should load in order for Emacs
to recognize and process the non-ASCII characters in HELLO for
transmission as email?

Ken