Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com> writes:

[...]

> There are a couple of assumptions here (and in Eric F.'s mail about the
> TeX input method as well). One is that the buffer is encoded in UTF-8:
> if you use e.g iso-8859-1, you can use whatever input method you want,
> but you'll end up with a byte in your file that LaTeX won't like.

Umm, just to clarify something: the file can well be in iso-8859-1
encoding.  It need not be in UTF-8 if all you want are typical west
European characters (umlauts etc.).  For instance, the following file
contents work just fine (I've forced iso-8859-1 encoding although I use
UTF-8 more often than not):

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
# -*- coding: iso-8859-1; -*-

* Introduction

This text includes a number of characters from España because we want
to say /cigüeña/ instead of /swan/.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

This exports just fine to latex and org automatically includes the line:

: \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

I've attached the org file in case anybody wants to play with this very
small example.