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### 22.16 Undisplayable Characters

There may be some non-ASCII characters that your terminal cannot display. Most text terminals support just a single character set (use the variable `default-terminal-coding-system` to tell Emacs which one, Terminal Coding); characters that can’t be encoded in that coding system are displayed as ‘`?`’ by default.

Graphical displays can display a broader range of characters, but you may not have fonts installed for all of them; characters that have no font appear as a hollow box.

If you use Latin-1 characters but your terminal can’t display Latin-1, you can arrange to display mnemonic ASCII sequences instead, e.g., ‘`"o`’ for o-umlaut. Load the library `iso-ascii` to do this.

If your terminal can display Latin-1, you can display characters from other European character sets using a mixture of equivalent Latin-1 characters and ASCII mnemonics. Customize the variable `latin1-display` to enable this. The mnemonic ASCII sequences mostly correspond to those of the prefix input methods.