Access of special characters

Anyone?

I would like to call up and print on screen some of the iso 8859-1
characters, i.e. the eth, thorn, the digraph ae, etc. To do that in
windows I could have gone to the character map and pointed and clicked,
or I could have used the numlock, alt+0208 for the cap eth, and so on.

I have looked up charmaps, man ascii, man iso_8859_X, etc, and I still
have no idea how to set about doing it in Linux. KDE Help gave me tons
of reading on related subjects, but I didn't find anything exactly to
the point.

Any ideas?

Bob Eaton