The hidden lines are still present in the buffer, and most editing commands see them as usual, so you may find point in the middle of the hidden text. When this happens, the cursor appears at the end of the previous line, after the three dots. If point is at the end of the visible line, before the newline that ends it, the cursor appears before the three dots. Then there is no visible indication of the hidden lines. This variable becomes local automatically when set.
Some European languages use accented letters and other special symbols.
The ISO 8859 Latin-1 character set defines character codes for many European languages in the range 160 to 255. Emacs can display those characters according to Latin-1, provided the terminal or font in use supports them. To do this, load the library iso-ascii . Some operating systems let you specify the language you are using by setting a locale. You can use ISO Accents mode.