131: How do I make Emacs display 8-bit characters? Emacs 19 has built-in support for 8-bit characters. Here is an excerpt from the "European Display" page of the on-line manual: Some European languages use accented letters and other special symbols. The ISO 8859 Latin-1 character set defines character codes for many European languages in the range 160 to 255. Emacs can display those characters according to Latin-1, provided the terminal or font in use supports them. The "M-x standard-display-european" command toggles European character display mode. With a numeric argument, "M-x standard-display-european" enables European character display if and only if the argument is positive. Some operating systems let you specify the language you are using by setting a locale. Emacs handles one common special case of this: if your locale name for character types contains the string "8859-1" or "88591", Emacs automatically enables European character display mode when it starts up.