Gnome-terminal isn't unable to set a default character encoding. On my system
locale is ok:

[zefram@nx01 ~]$ locale
LANG=it_IT.iso885915@euro
LC_CTYPE=it_IT.iso885915@euro
LC_NUMERIC="it_IT.iso885915@euro"
LC_TIME="it_IT.iso885915@euro"
LC_COLLATE="it_IT.iso885915@euro"
LC_MONETARY="it_IT.iso885915@euro"
LC_MESSAGES=en_US
LC_PAPER="it_IT.iso885915@euro"
LC_NAME="it_IT.iso885915@euro"
LC_ADDRESS="it_IT.iso885915@euro"
LC_TELEPHONE="it_IT.iso885915@euro"
LC_MEASUREMENT="it_IT.iso885915@euro"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="it_IT.iso885915@euro"
LC_ALL=

and 

[zefram@nx01 ~]$ locale -a | grep ^it_IT
it_IT
it_IT@euro
it_IT.iso88591
it_IT.iso885915@euro
it_IT.utf8

so the chosen locale is supported.

Nevertheless, gnome-terminal always start with a character encoding "Current
Locale (UTF-8).

It's impossible to remove UTF-8 as default encoding (I've tried this as adding
ISO-8859-15 as character encoding, and then removing UTF-8 to have ISO-8859-15
as default), there is not a "choose default character encoding" options
anywhere, and there is not a command line options to choose the character encoding. 

It took me hours trying to find why, as an example, less was unable to display
properly some files, and so cat, while vi was ok. And this problem, worste,
appears with slrn.

This problem could be related to the behaviour of the file command, because if
the intented-to-view file is categorized as UTF-8 Unicode text gnome-terminal is
capable of displaying it properly, while when it's a "ISO-8859-text" I lost the
èàò etc characters. 

Anymway, the suggested feature would resolve the problem, and could also be
helpfule in other scenarios like the definition of different gnome-terminal
icons, to see different types of document.

Really, I do not understand why this feature is missing.


Other information:
The problem appears with Fedora Core 3.0 and Scientific Linux 64bit 4.0 (a
rebuild of RedHat Enterprise Linux).