(emacs.info) Enabling Multibyte

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 Enabling Multibyte Characters
 =============================
 
    You can enable or disable multibyte character support, either for
 Emacs as a whole, or for a single buffer.  When multibyte characters are
 disabled in a buffer, then each byte in that buffer represents a
 character, even codes 0200 through 0377.  The old features for
 supporting the European character sets, ISO Latin-1 and ISO Latin-2,
 work as they did in Emacs 19 and also work for the other ISO 8859
 character sets.
 
    However, there is no need to turn off multibyte character support to
 use ISO Latin; the Emacs multibyte character set includes all the
 characters in these character sets, and Emacs can translate
 automatically to and from the ISO codes.
 
    To edit a particular file in unibyte representation, visit it using
 `find-file-literally'.   Visiting.  To convert a buffer in
 multibyte representation into a single-byte representation of the same
 characters, the easiest way is to save the contents in a file, kill the
 buffer, and find the file again with `find-file-literally'.  You can
 also use `C-x <RET> c' (`universal-coding-system-argument') and specify
 `raw-text' as the coding system with which to find or save a file.
  Specify Coding.  Finding a file as `raw-text' doesn't disable
 format conversion, uncompression and auto mode selection as
 `find-file-literally' does.
 
    To turn off multibyte character support by default, start Emacs with
 the `--unibyte' option ( Initial Options), or set the
 environment variable `EMACS_UNIBYTE'.  You can also customize
 `enable-multibyte-characters' or, equivalently, directly set the
 variable `default-enable-multibyte-characters' in your init file to
 have basically the same effect as `--unibyte'.
 
    Multibyte strings are not created during initialization from the
 values of environment variables, `/etc/passwd' entries etc. that
 contain non-ASCII 8-bit characters.  However, the initialization file is
 normally read as multibyte--like Lisp files in general--even with
 `--unibyte'.  To avoid multibyte strings being generated by non-ASCII
 characters in it, put `-*-unibyte: t;-*-' in a comment on the first
 line.  Do the same for initialization files for packages like Gnus.
 
    The mode line indicates whether multibyte character support is
 enabled in the current buffer.  If it is, there are two or more
 characters (most often two dashes) before the colon near the beginning
 of the mode line.  When multibyte characters are not enabled, just one
 dash precedes the colon.
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