efaq: Emacs does not display 8-bit characters
10.1 How do I make Emacs display 8-bit characters?
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Single-byte Character Set Support (emacs)Unibyte Mode. On a
Unix, when Emacs runs on a text-only terminal display or is invoked with
‘emacs -nw’, you typically need to use ‘set-terminal-coding-system’ to
tell Emacs what the terminal can display, even after setting the
language environment; otherwise non-ASCII characters will display as
‘?’. On other operating systems, such as MS-DOS and MS-Windows, Emacs
queries the OS about the character set supported by the display, and
sets up the required terminal coding system automatically.
Info Catalog
efaq: Alternate character sets
efaq: Inputting eight-bit characters