10.4 Character set

As described in See section Defining charset, Mew automatically chooses an appropriate charset for the message when composing.

If characters of multiple languages exist, and if it is necessary to use an international charset, ‘mew-charset-m17n’ is used. Its default value is "utf-8" (equivalent to Unicode). If you want to set it to "iso-2022-jp-2", configure like this:

(setq mew-charset-m17n "iso-2022-jp-2")

If you want to check a chosen charset when composing, configure ‘mew-ask-charset’.

‘nil’

Not ask.

‘A list of charset’

Ask if the charset is not a member of the list.

‘t’

Ask if ‘mew-charset-m17n’ is used.

For instance, if you want to check when charset other than US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, and ISO-8859-15, configure like this:

(setq mew-ask-charset '("us-ascii" "iso-8859-1" "iso-8859-15"))

For example, when "utf-8" is chosen for a message with this configuration, you are asked like this:

utf-8 is used. OK? (y or n) 

Typing ‘y’ makes the composed message sent (or queued). If you type ‘n’, you will go back to the original draft.

In Europe Latin 9 (ISO-8859-15 or Latin 0), which includes the euro sign, is getting more and more popular instead of Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1). If characters of both Latin 1 and Lain 9 exist in a draft, Mew takes the following step to decide a charset.

1. If ‘unify-8859-on-decoding-mode’ is used:
   1. Use "iso-8859-1" if no loss.
   2. Otherwise, use "utf-8".
2. If ‘unify-8859-on-decoding-mode’ is not used:
   1. If both ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 can be used with no loss, ‘mew-charset-latin’ is used.
   2. Use "iso-8859-1" if no loss.
   3. Use "iso-8859-15" if no loss.
   4. Otherwise, use "utf-8".

The default value of ‘mew-charset-latin’ is "iso-8859-15". If you want to set it to "iso-8859-1", configure like this:

(setq mew-charset-latin "iso-8859-1")

If you want to always use UTF-8 for any characters other than US-ASCII, configure as follows:

(setq mew-cs-database-for-encoding
      `(((ascii) nil "7bit" "7bit")
        (nil utf-8 "base64" "B")))

This document was generated by U-X61T\saito on June, 6 2008 using texi2html 1.78.