[AUCTeX] Fold half whitespaces / utf8 problems

[Frederik]

Hi to everyone,

I use half whitespaces "\," a lot, as I often use abbreviations. This 
may cause very ugly code. So I wanted to fold the half whitespaces with 
the bullet symbol: ∙

But when I try to save the .emacs file, emacs complains that it can't 
encode the non-latin symbol. How do I make emacs open and save the 
.emacs file in utf-8? Or is there a better solution?
When I choose "Options - Mule - Set coding systems - For saving this 
buffer - utf-8" and reopen .emacs, some symbols get mixed up, including 
the bullet symbol.

I find the handling of encoding by emacs a bit confusing...
Is emacs able to choose whether to read a file as utf-8 or normal latin 
automatically? A short dialogue when saving a buffer the first time (on 
C-c C-w), asking in which format the file should be written, would be 
nice, I think.

Regards,
Fred