To unicode or not to unicode

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Ron Garret wrote:
> In article <499F0CF0.8070800 at v.loewis.de>,
>  "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> I'm the OP.  I'm using MT-Newswatcher 3.5.1.  I thought I had it 
> configured properly, but I guess I didn't.

Probably you did. However, it then means that the newsreader is crap.

> Under 
> Preferences->Languages->Send Messages with Encoding I had selected 
> latin-1.

That sounds like early nineties, before the invention of MIME.

> I didn't know I also needed to have MIME turned on for that to 
> work.  I've turned it on now.  Is this better?
> 
> This should be a micro sign: µ

Not really (it's worse, from my point of view - but might be better
for others). You are now sending in UTF-8, but there is still no
MIME declaration in the news headers. As a consequence, my newsreader
continues to interpret it as Latin-1 (which it assumes as the default
encoding), and it comes out as moji-bake (in responding, my reader
should declare the encoding properly, so you should see what I see,
namely A-circumflex, micro sign)

If you look at the message headers / message source as sent e.g.
by MRAB, you'll notice lines like

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

These lines are missing from your posting.

Assuming the newsreader is not crap, it might help to set the default
send encoding to ASCII. When sending micro sign, the newsreader might
infer that ASCII is not good enough, and use MIME - although it then
still needs to pick an encoding.

Regards,
Martin