greek characters

[Jörg Hagmann]

Dear list members,

I have been using emacs for a few months but am still trying to find 
out how to type greek letters (e.g.: a-ketoglutarate, the a should be 
an alpha).

I looked at the online manuals, but I don't understand what is written 
there.
I checked the archives, but simple things like this are probably not 
discussed there.
I bought "Learning GNU Emacs" from O'Reilly, but they only explain 
obvious things that one could find out without the book.
I tried changing "Options" but I have no idea where to begin and 
nothing I tried worked.

Could somebody explain in SIMPLE words what to do? There is a deadline 
for handing in a TeX/ConTeXt document ...

I'm running GNU emacs version 21 on Mac OS X, international keyboard, 
english language; and on GNU/Linux with a British keyboard.

I managed to get the accents (aigu, grave, umlauts etc.) by C-x C-m C-\ 
latin-1-prefix. The characters are displayed as empty boxes, but I can 
live with that for the moment. (C-h h displays mostly empty boxes).

Thank you for your help, Jörg