Article 978982 of rec.arts.sf.fandom:
From: Dan Hoey <haoyuep@aol.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom
Subject: Re: This newsgroup was touted in a Denvention newsletter
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:56:18 -0400
Organization: Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC

Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> Dan Hoey <haoyuep@aol.com> wrote:
>> Keith F. Lynch wrote:
>>> You certainly can search and destroy a \324 character (a lowercase
>>> a with a hat over it) or anything else in Emacs.  What makes you
>>> think otherwise?

>> Like I said, your mileage will almost certainly vary.  In Emacs
>> running in a shell window in a MacOSX Terminal.app session, the
>> '\324's are different from the 'a circumflex'es, and you can't
>> query-replace the former.

> What version of Emacs is that?  Here on Panix I'm using:
> GNU Emacs 21.3.1 (i386-unknown-netbsdelf1.5.2) of 2003-04-08

This is the
GNU Emacs 22.1.1 (mac-apple-darwin, Carbon Version 1.6.0) of 2008-05-28
that came with MacOSX 10.5.

> What does it say when you put the cursor on the character(s) and
> press control-X then equal-sign?  I get:
> Char: â (0342, 226, 0xe2, file 0xE2)

It says:

Char: \303 (195, #o303, #xc3, part of display "\303\242"->"\342")

This is with the cursor on the \ in "Jan van\342M-^@M-^Yt Ent" in the
output of

  pdftotext -enc UTF=8 -layout newsletter9.pdf -|cat -v

The "\342" is displayed in red, and the cursor won't go under any other
part of the \342.

Dan