Next: Inputting eight-bit characters, Up: Alternate character sets

### 11.1 How do I make Emacs display 8-bit characters?

see Single-byte Character Set Support. 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.