Encoding help

["B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net>]

I have a file created by saving a pdf as text and I want to convert the 
whole thing to utf-8 encoding. If I force the encoding for save in Emacs 
23.0 to utf-8 I get the following in a *Warning* buffer:

These default coding systems were tried to encode text
in the buffer `span.txt':
   (utf-8-dos (122 . 4194285) (165 . 4194257) (204 . 4194285) (253
   . 4194257) (292 . 4194285) (372 . 4194289) (410 . 4194285) (418
   . 4194285) (653 . 4194217) (689 . 4194285) (731 . 4194285))
   (iso-latin-1-dos (122 . 4194285) (165 . 4194257) (204 . 4194285)
   (253 . 4194257) (292 . 4194285) (372 . 4194289) (410 . 4194285) (418
   . 4194285) (653 . 4194217) (689 . 4194285) (731 . 4194285))
However, each of them encountered characters it couldn't encode:

[Below are many dozens of \xxx octal escape sequences]

   utf-8-dos cannot encode these:                     ...
   iso-latin-1-dos cannot encode these:                     ...

The original pdf shows many standard diacritics for Romance languages 
along with a few vowels with macrons. There is no option in Adobe Reader 
for saving as encoded text. If my only option is to Search and Replace 
these escape sequences with Unicode characters, how can I get a list of 
all these bad characters (they all show in red in Emacs 23 anyway). Has 
any of you written routines to replace things like these using a list of 
dotted pairs or something similar?


Thanks,

Ed