Ludger Sicking
If you installed GNU Emacs yourself, you probably know enough about Emacs to install Mule-UCS yourself as well. If you want to do Japanese in UTF-8 with Emacs you need it.
What does this package provide? Why should I install it? (if it is useful, of course I will do.... ;-)
As I wrote, you need if you want to use UTF-8 encoding in (X)Emacs.
In Emacs you can use a small subset of UTF-8 already without Mule-UCS
(mainly characters used in European languages), but for CJK languages
in UTF-8 you need Mule-UCS. In XEmacs, you always need Mule-UCS to
use UTF-8 encoding, even if you only use European languages.
Why use UTF-8 encoding?
Because it enables you to use the same encoding for many languages.
I run my computers in ja_JP.UTF-8 locale, it nice to be able to view
Files containing Japanese and German Umlauts simply with less in a
terminal like mlterm or xiterm and have everything display correctly.
It's far more comfortable than always switching locales if you use
more than one non-English language.
--
Mike Fabian