On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 10:38:37AM +0000, Angus Comber wrote:
> I sometimes need to insert mathematical symbols into my emacs text files
> and when I do I get prompted for a coding system.  And the default is
> japanese-shift-jis which seems strange when less than half the population
> of the world is Japanese.  I am in the UK, what coding system should I use?

Almost always utf-8. Select utf-8-unix, utf-8-dos or utf-8-mac depending
on your preferred platform (they differ in the line endings).

Cheers
-- tomás