Re: emacs -nw and accented characters

[Joel Smith]

> terminal-coding-system is irrelevant when using X, as Emacs loads the
> fonts it needs directly. Perhaps your "aterm" is expecting accented
> characters to be something other than iso-8859-1 (utf-8 for
> example). You need to set terminal-coding-system to match what the
> terminal expects.

> It looks fine in an xterm for me.  Try to set you locale.  Maybe
> something like LANG=en_US.iso88591.

I'm not quite sure what I should do to handle the first suggestion. a
differences of the output of mule-diag in emacs -nw in an xterm and an
aterm yields no differences.  as far as emacs is concerned mule
(coding systems, etc.) is operating in the same way between terminals,
but the results are different.  what does it mean to "set
terminal-coding-system to match what the terminal expects?"  What does
the terminal expect?

as far as xterm goes, emacs does behave well inside of it.  emacs -nw with
xterm will display accented characters.  aterm displays accented
characters, but emacs -nw inside of aterm does not..  

the differences in environment variables* are...

variable                aterm                           xterm
COLORFGBG=              'default;default'               
COLORTERM=              rxvt-xpm
PPID=                   1505                            1400
SHLVL=                  3                               2
WINDOWID=               44040194                        41943058

* generated by executing the command "set" within aterm and xterm at
  the command prompt.   

any advice would be greatly appreciated.