locales and terminal

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

hi,

I've browsedsome recent posts but didn't see a direct answer, sorry if
I'm being repetitive.  

I've recently started geting emails in french and german that I need
to be able read.  And I'd like to be able to respond to them in french
and german as well...  

so I set LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 .

but this does not allow the display of the relevant accented
characters.  Instead, I get a variety of responses from different
programs -- emacs gives ?'s, cat gives funny hieroglyphics, and mutt
in the default pager gives what I take are numerical character codes,
eg \344 .  

so what's the problem?  do I need a different system font or
something?  I would have thought locales would take care of that...  

the other thing is, when I run dpkg-reconfigure locales, it doesn't
let me set the default locale.  The menu dialog comes up, but there
are no choices.  Could these things be related?  

I've been avoidingthis problem, but since I'm a european historian I'm
really getting to the point where I have to be able to read and write
in other languages... any help, or pointers to really good
documentation/how-tos, would be extremely appreciated.
thanks,
matt