Re: Default coding system ?

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il>]

> From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Fran=E7ois_Fleuret?= <francois.fleuret@inria.fr>
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help,gnus.emacs.gnus
> Date: 03 Dec 2003 13:22:56 +0100
> 
> I read my mail with gnus, and from time to time, especially with spam
> mails, gnus asks for a coding system with the following warning

Please tell when Emacs asks these questions.  They are generally asked
only when Emacs needs to write text to a file or send it to another
process.

> | Select one of the following safe coding systems, or edit the buffer:
> |   utf-8
> | Or specify any other coding system
> | on your risk of losing the problematic characters.
> `----
> 
> I looked for a list of default coding systems with apropos-value
> "iso-latin-1" but could not figure what list to change ...

Why didn't you select the only encoding suggested by Emacs, which is
UTF-8?  That'd do the job, I think, since the characters you showed
in your message are not part of ISO 8859-1.  Can you try that next
time and see if it solves the problem?

> And this
> coding system issue is such a mess that I can not find the courage to
> go deeper in the documentations.

Why do you need courage to read the documentation?  The manual doesn't
bite, you know.  So please do try reading it, and if something there
isn't clear, please complain on gnu.emacs.bug about documentation
quality.  That will allow us to make the docs better for the next
release.

TIA