; Mention non-ASCII encoding issues in CONTRIBUTE

* CONTRIBUTE: Document recommendations for encoding non-ASCII
characters in Emacs sources.

diff --git a/CONTRIBUTE b/CONTRIBUTE
index 609ab7acb6b0fb76c4e6ba601ad24eeefe13aa7b..098579e11afc15a6d682f6cd212d926e3b0df4ea 100644 (file)
--- a/CONTRIBUTE
+++ b/CONTRIBUTE
@@ -201,6 +201,20 @@ then exclude that commit from the merge to trunk.
 
 ** Other process information
 
+*** Non-ASCII characters in Emacs files
+
+If you introduce non-ASCII characters into Emacs source files, it is a
+good idea to add a 'coding' cookie to the file to state its encoding.
+Please use the UTF-8 encoding unless it cannot do the job for some
+good reason.  As of Emacs 24.4, it is no longer necessary to have
+explicit 'coding' cookies in *.el files if they are encoded in UTF-8,
+but other files need them even if encoded in UTF-8.  And even for *.el
+files, having an explicit encoding specification facilitates correct
+display of non-ASCII characters when the file is visited in older
+Emacs versions.
+
+*** Useful files in the admin/ directory
+
 See all the files in admin/notes/* .  In particular, see
 admin/notes/newfile, see admin/notes/repo.