shift-jis is the addition for katakana-jisx0201 characters (which is normally called hankaku-katakana), it is rarely used, though. And utf-8 is the addition for characters other than these. Kai> Also, if the above change is good for Japanese users, why isn't Kai> it good for everybody else, too? Do you think that there are Kai> non-Japanese out there who prefer the current behavior? Kai> Maybe it is a good idea to put your change in Gnus. By surely using this, I can write Japanese and doubtful English. However, I do not know the other language (also Chinese and Korean). Therefore, I cannot judge whether it is proper. [...] Kai> Another thought: Mule itself also has a priority list of Kai> encodings. So I wonder why does Gnus need another priority list? Kai> Normally, I'd guess that Japanese would normally configure their Kai> Emacs for the right priorities, and then Gnus should do the right Kai> thing automatically. There could be two reasons why this is not Kai> happening: (1) Japanese use a different encoding in email than in Kai> editing files, or (2) the priorities that Emacs sets up normally Kai> do not propagate properly to Gnus, or (3) Emacs does not set Kai> itself up for the right priorities at all when users setup a Kai> Japanese language environment. Yes, I can't count... That's a good consideration. (1) is the main reason. Though iso-2022-jp is used for mail messages, euc-jp has mainly been used in UNIX and DOS has used shift_jis. Although it will be different with the system-type, Emacs gives a priority to euc-jp or shift_jis in general and it is a right way for editing files. It seems to be a good way that Emacs offers the priority list for mails apart from the list for files for the specified language environment. -- Katsumi Yamaoka