Many thanks Andrea, you are indeed very kind to try to help me when everything works fine in your configuration by default. 

My OS is Debian (testing) GNU Linux and I'm working with emacs-snapshot. 

In fact I have realized that this problem of accents appears only with Gnome pdf viewer immediately open after C-e l-o . There is no problem when I compile after directly to pdflatex the latex file produced with the org file. Therefore it is a minor bug or a minor problem. 

But I meet several difficulties with my tentative of transition from writing  .tex files to .org files instead. Therefore I am going to write an email to this list of very kind and helpful people. 

Best wishes ,

Jo. 


2013/12/29 Andrea Rossetti <andrea.rossetti@gmail.com>

Joseph Vidal-Rosset <joseph.vidal.rosset@gmail.com> writes:
> ... Is it a way to automatically save the .org
> file in utf8 ? In my emacs the encoding is utf8 by default.
>

  Sorry, I never customized file-coding-system-alist
and related variables, defaults worked well for me, so
unfortunately I don't have good hints... but please note
that in my simple environment (Win7 + Emacs 24.3 + Org 8.2.2-elpa
+ nearly zero customizations) I can export org to PDF with
àèìòù (Italian) without any need to specify encodings, it
just worked out-of-the-box.

I would suggest to investigate in these directions:

1) try to see what happens without customizations
   (maybe by running "emacs -Q")

2) try to force utf8 on that specific org file, by saying in
the head line:
# -*- mode:org; ....your settings...; coding:utf-8 -*-

3) or alternatively:
# -*- mode:org; ....your settings...; coding:iso-8859-1 -*-

  Kindest regards,

      Andrea