Joe doesn't show 8-bit characters properly by default. Removing the space before -asis in /usr/lib/joe/joerc will fix that.
Can you send me a file? It works for me, with a Norwegian text (with Norwegian characters). Finnish may or may not work - that's not iso-8859-1, which may (or may not - I'm not sure) complicate things further.
Without this, e.g. 'd' is shown as 'd' on gray background. Diff against latest rawhide /usr/lib/joe/joerc. -- joerc~ Thu May 25 22:17:21 2000 +++ joerc Thu May 25 22:17:30 2000 @@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ -marking Text between ^KB and cursor is highlighted (use with -lightoff) - -asis Characters 128 - 255 shown as-is +-asis Characters 128 - 255 shown as-is -force Force final newline when files are saved ------- Or did you mean some other file?
I can't reproduce it when loading a text with many Norwegian (and some Swedish) characters.
This seems to be caused by LC_CTYPE, LC_ALL, or some such environment variable. If you set e.g. LC_CTYPE="" and LC_ALL="", this will surface. By default, Redhat 6.2 at least didn't set any LC_* variables.
That's expected behaviour - the LC_CTYPE (or LANG/LC_ALL, which affects more settings) is there for exactly this kind of problem. Red Hat Linux should set some of these settings (possibly only LANG, which is suffcient) during install - it's changeable with locale_config.