GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual

35.14.4: ISO Latin 1

If you have a terminal that can handle the entire ISO Latin 1 character set, you can arrange to use that character set as follows:

(require 'disp-table)
;; Set char codes 160--255 to display as themselves.
;; (Codes 128--159 are the additional control characters.)
(standard-display-8bit 160 255)

If you are editing buffers written in the ISO Latin 1 character set and your terminal doesn't handle anything but ASCII, you can load the file iso-ascii to set up a display table that displays the other ISO characters as explanatory sequences of ASCII characters. For example, the character ``o with umlaut'' displays as {"o}.

Some European countries have terminals that don't support ISO Latin 1 but do support the special characters for that country's language. You can define a display table to work one language using such terminals. For an example, see lisp/iso-swed.el, which handles certain Swedish terminals.

You can load the appropriate display table for your terminal automatically by writing a terminal-specific Lisp file for the terminal type.