How to use 8-bit charsets on newsgroups?

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

Silly me,

I am using Emacs 21.3 (MULE) under Solaris 2.8 on a Sun/SPARC Sunblade
150, and posting using T-Gnus 6.15.13 r00. I can't get Japanese to
display correctly in my posts, although the message header subject
line is correctly displayed in my posts!

In my .emacs file I have euc-jp setup as the encoding:

(set-language-environment 'Japanese) 
(setq default-file-coding-system'euc-jp) 
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'euc-jp)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'euc-jp) 
(set-buffer-file-coding-system'euc-jp) 
;; set euc for processing IO (for example, jman,ls,tcsh,...)
(setq default-process-coding-system '(euc-jp . euc-jp))

I then use the egg input method for Japanese. When I post, I get the
warning 'post contains b-bit characters. Really post?' And if I post,
the characters are encoded incorrectly....

This is what the information on the coding system says when I am posting:

| Coding system for saving this buffer:
|   Not set locally, use the default.
| Default coding system (for new files):
|   nil
| Coding system for keyboard input:
|   E -- euc-jp (alias of japanese-iso-8bit)
| Coding system for terminal output:
|   E -- euc-jp (alias of japanese-iso-8bit)
| Defaults for subprocess I/O:
|   decoding: - -- undecided (alias: unix dos mac)
|   encoding: 1 -- iso-latin-1 (alias: iso-8859-1 latin-1)
| 
| Priority order for recognizing coding systems when reading files:
|  1. iso-latin-1 (alias: iso-8859-1 latin-1)
|   2. iso-2022-jp (alias: junet)
|   3. iso-2022-7bit 
|   4. iso-2022-7bit-lock (alias: iso-2022-int-1)
|   5. iso-2022-8bit-ss2 
|   6. emacs-mule 
|   7. raw-text (alias: mew-cs-text mew-cs-text-lf mew-cs-text-crlf 
mew-cs-text-cr mew-cs-text-net)
|   8. japanese-shift-jis (alias: shift_jis sjis)
|   9. chinese-big5 (alias: big5 cn-big5)
|   10. no-conversion (alias: binary)
|   11. mule-utf-8 (alias: utf-8)
| 
|   Other coding systems cannot be distinguished automatically
|   from these, and therefore cannot be recognized automatically
|   with the present coding system priorities.
| 
|   The followings are decoded correctly but recognized as iso-2022-7bit-lock:
|     iso-2022-7bit-ss2 iso-2022-7bit-lock-ss2 iso-2022-cn iso-2022-cn-ext 
iso-2022-jp-2 iso-2022-kr


Looking at 'charsets' in the gnus info file, I see that the
gnus-group-posting-charset-alist and the gnus-group-charset-alist are
as default, so iso-2022-jp-2 should be used for posting to fj* or
japan* groups.

Can anyone point out either where have I gone wrong in my setup and
broken the encoding, or point me to where I should look for more
information?

Many thanks in advance - will you believe that I was under the
mistaken impression gnus couldn't handle 8-bit character set
encoding?!?!?! Hope that didn't ruin any keyboards :-)
-- 
G Hassenpflug RASC, Kyoto University