Converting German Umlauts to LaTeX

[Christian Herenz <herenz@physik.hu-berlin.de>]

Hello,
I am totally new to this eMail-List, so I hope this question does not 
seem dumb, or so..

I write my LaTeX documents usually in emacs, that works very fine at my 
personal computer. Since I am german, I use the UTF-8 encoding. I load 
the package for UTF-8 encoding in TeX simply with 
/usepackage[utf-8]{inputenc}, which really improves typing a lot (I am 
german, so I use frequently umlauts and the szlig).

However, at the computer-terminals in our institute, they do not support 
UTF-8. LaTeX gives me an error-message, that [utf-8] is not supported by 
inputenc.

My idea was to convert the document into an UTF-8 free file. So that all 
occurences of umlauts will be converted into the LaTeX equivalent (e.g. 
ö to "o), and I could also compile the file on the debain-boxes at our 
instiute.

I think that this could be achived with a few lines of code, but I am 
somewhat new to customize emacs with elisp (havent done anything yet), 
so could you please give me a hint or point me where to look.

Thanks in advance,
Christian from Germany