displayed in *Buffer List* and the size of the file made by saving the very same buffer?
Mule allocates a unique "leading character" to each coding system. The internal representation of a character other than an ASCII character begins with a leading character. Therefore inside of Mule, 8 bit characters like Latin-1 are represented in 2 bytes, and 16 bit characters like kanji are represented in 3 bytes. When you save the contents of a buffer with the internal representation, the size of the buffer and the file will be the same. If another encoding is used for file output, they will be different.