displaying international characters

[Ali El Dada]

Hi,

I used to be able to type a whole range of chacters in emacs, for 
example phonetic symbols, letters with dots below them, etc, and all 
from my custom made xkb keyboard. Now, after doing some updates to my 
system during the last few months, I try to type the same characters and 
it doesn't work in emacs, although it still works in, say, the web 
browser. Any hints where I'm doing wrong?

I have the language environment set to UTF-8, which is also set as the 
encoding to save the file with. And emacs should still have the fonts, 
because I can still see the special characters well-displayed in old 
files. When I try now emacs doesn't even type a box for a missing 
character, it doesn't even respond :(

M-x emacs-version says: GNU Emacs 21.4.2 (i386-mandrake-linux-gnu...

Thank you.

Ali