gnome-terminal and some character codings

["JOAO PAULO PAGAIME DA SILVA" <a28123 alunos det ua pt>]

Hi,

 characters like "é", "ü", "ã" or "ç" aren't displayed in
gnome-terminal. However, after clicking 
Terminal->Character
Coding->Unicode they are displayed. Is there any way to 
make this the
default (set the default encoding to UTF-8)? I tried to 
edit the profile
but there's nothing regarding this. When i execute 
gnome-terminal like
# LC_ALL=pt_PT gnome-terminal --disable-factory
i get those characters displayed, but i don't want to use 
a different
charset, i'm fine with the default. I just want to be able 
to display
those characters.

 Thanks for your time, Joao