3.3 Altering your character set configuration

If you find that special characters (accented characters, for example, or line-drawing characters) are not being displayed correctly in your PuTTY session, it may be that PuTTY is interpreting the characters sent by the server according to the wrong character set. There are a lot of different character sets available, and no good way for PuTTY to know which to use, so it's entirely possible for this to happen.

If you click ‘Change Settings’ and look at the ‘Translation’ panel, you should see a large number of character sets which you can select, and other related options. Now all you need is to find out which of them you want! (See section 4.10 for more information.)