Questions on charset encoding detection and keyboard layout

["Hou, Ruoyu" <phoenixhou@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I am a beginner to emacs and starting to experience some problems on 
multilingual editing. I just hope someone would kindly give me some 
hints. My main platform is NetBSD 5.0.1 running emacs23.1-gtk from pkgsrc.

1. My working environment involves handling documents with major eastern 
Asian characters in different encodings(GB2312, GB18030, BIG5, GBK, 
UTF-8, Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, ISO-2022-JP). My language environment was set 
as UTF-8, because I want all the documents *I create* saved as UTF-8, 
and properly display/edit/save other file in different encodings without 
changing the raw encodings. I noticed that my emacs was not properly 
recognizing documents encoded with euc-jp, so I have to manually set it 
every time I encounter such documents. Is there any configurations I 
could tweak to accurately auto-detect and display the file encodings I 
mentioned above? In most occasions, I don't have any a priori knowledge 
on what the exact encoding is in a given document.

 From the manual I learnt that some encodings are not easily 
distinguishable one another. So I guess the setting would be delicate. 
Some gvim user mentioned that EUC-JP has to be located before GBK in 
encoding list to get appropriate result.

2. I'm using a computer with Japanese keyboard layout(a 84-key notebook 
variant of jp-106). When using emacs in X GUI mode, the language 
conversion keys (<henkan>, <muhenkan>, <hirakana/katakana>, etc.) 
respond perfectly in echo area, so I can bind some key macros to toggle 
Japanese input method. However, when I start emacs -nw in say uxterm, 
those keys are not echoed.

Frankly, I prefer to run emacs in non-GUI mode for faster response on my 
old notebook. I'm wondering if I could also configure those conversion 
keys to work the same as in GUI mode. Do I have to changing any settings 
in X or emacs? Is there anyone experiencing a similar situation?

I have to confess that I do not have much experiences in emacs after 
switching my work platform to open source softwares, and as a somewhat 
busy benchwork biologist I probably missed some homework I should have 
done before asking. I would appreciate any hints or reference readings. 
Thanks for any attention.

Regards,
-- 
Hou, Ruoyu

Laboratory of Reproductive & Stem Cell Biology,
College of Life Science & Biotech.,
Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
Shanghai 200240, P.R.China.