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(emacs)Multibyte Conversion

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Unibyte and Multibyte Non-ASCII characters
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   When multibyte characters are enabled, character codes 0240 (octal)
through 0377 (octal) are not really legitimate in the buffer.  The valid
non-ASCII printing characters have codes that start from 0400.

   If you type a self-inserting character in the range 0240 through
0377, or if you use `C-q' to insert one, Emacs assumes you intended to
use one of the ISO Latin-N character sets, and converts it to the Emacs
code representing that Latin-N character.  You select _which_ ISO Latin
character set to use through your choice of language environment (Note:
Language Environments).  If you do not specify a choice, the default
is Latin-1.

   If you insert a character in the range 0200 through 0237, which
forms the `eight-bit-control' character set, it is inserted literally.
You should normally avoid doing this since buffers containing such
characters have to be written out in either the `emacs-mule' or
`raw-text' coding system, which is usually not what you want.