Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:00:37 -0500
From: ken <gebser@mousecar.com>
....
Select one of the following safe coding systems:
iso-2022-jp-2 x-ctext iso-2022-7bit raw-text emacs-mule no-conversion
ctext-no-compositions iso-2022-8bit-ss2 iso-2022-7bit-lock
iso-2022-7bit-ss2 tibetan-iso-8bit-with-esc thai-tis620-with-esc
lao-with-esc korean-iso-8bit-with-esc hebrew-iso-8bit-with-esc
greek-iso-8bit-with-esc iso-latin-9-with-esc iso-latin-8-with-esc
iso-latin-5-with-esc iso-latin-4-with-esc iso-latin-3-with-esc
iso-latin-2-with-esc iso-latin-1-with-esc
in-is13194-devanagari-with-esc cyrillic-iso-8bit-with-esc
chinese-iso-8bit-with-esc japanese-iso-8bit-with-esc
===================================================================
Entering "utf-8" into the minibuffer, of course, doesn't work. Frankly,
I'd like to save into utf-8
You can't, not with Emacs 21. In that version, the same character in
different character sets was treated as 2 different characters. Also,
the mule-utf-8 character set didn't include the Latin-1 characters.
The only suggestion I have is to try iso-latin-1-with-esc (you will
see above that this is one of the possibilities suggested by Emacs),
it should at least produce a Latin-1 encoded file, which will be
easier on you later.
You really need to upgrade your Emacs, if you want to use UTF-8.