Minor modes for ISO Latin-1 that allow one to easily input this character set have been written by several people. Such modes have been written by Matthieu Herrb <matthieu@laas.fr> (laas.laas.fr:pub/emacs/iso-latin-1.el), Johan Vromans <jv@mh.nl> {FTP site??}, and Marc Shapiro <shapiro@sor.inria.fr> {FTP site??}.
These approaches differ from the one taken by Anders Edenbrandt in that his method uses direct 8-bit input, while these methods use a compose sequence for 8-bit characters. {I have heard conflicting reports on whether this results in losing the Meta key. Perhaps this depends on whether Emacs is running under X. Can someone resolve this?}
Karl Heuer <karl@haddock.ima.isc.com> is said to have a patch to allow 8-bit input. Georg-Wilhelm Koltermann <gwk@crmunich0.cray.com> also has a patch for either 18.57 or 18.58 that allows 8-bit input.
Epoch comes with a patch that allows it to input 8-bit characters, but it is not enabled by default. {Is this right?}
Jamie Zawinski says:
Lucid GNU Emacs allows the input of any ISO-8859/1 keysyms that your keyboard generates (see xmodmap), and contains a package that implements a DEC/OpenWindows-like "Compose" key for systems which don't have one.