Re: ASCII-only startup message?

[Yuri Khan]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Random832 <address@hidden> wrote:

> To take a step back and think about solving both problems... What
> about a list of characters - to include, by default, quotation marks
> and apostrophes and maybe a few other things like dashes - that are
> allowed to be silently mapped to best-fit ASCII equivalents when
> writing a buffer in a coding system that does not support them?

Bad idea. If the user fixes typography in a file and forgets to change
the target encoding before saving, they risk losing their work.

Emacs could opt to auto-degrade its generated text when initializing
the *scratch* buffer when its coding system cannot represent curly
quotes, but that’s the limit.

<contentious suggestion>
Alternatively, new buffers could be initially created with the UTF-8
encoding, leaving the locale-specified encoding only for dealing with
legacy files.
</contentious suggestion>