Am 18.09.2008 um 15:41 schrieb Armando Martins:

By setting the right encoding for the text in the buffer! The ISO
Latin encodings are fine, some MS Losedos code pages (125[02]) also
have LATIN SMALL LETTER [EO] WITH ACUTE on code points octal \351
resp. \363.

The mode-line of a recent GNU Emacs shows the encoding used in the
buffer, the Options menu has a Mule entry which lets you choose
another coding system by reverting this file now (C-x RET r).

Setting environment variables like LANG or LC_CTYPE to a reasonable
value can enable GNU Emacs to use this reasonable value to present
you a text file's contents. You can also try to set

(prefer-coding-system 'iso-8859-15)

in your init file.