How to resolve encoding conflicts between your server and Big Medium.
Accented characters look fine when I enter them in Big Medium, so why do they get garbled on the published pages?
Once you get beyond the basic characters of ABC's and 123's, computers use special encoding methods to display accented characters, non-western characters, even curly quotes. The trouble is, there are many of these encoding methods and they aren't compatible.
What's happening on your site is that either the server or your custom template is telling browsers that it's using a different character set (probably ISO-8859-1) than the character set used in Big Medium's pages (UTF-8). The result is that accented characters get garbled or don't display at all.
If so, make sure that your templates use the <%htmlhead%> widget instead of your own <head> tags.
If your templates do include <%htmlhead%>, and you still see the problem, it's a server configuration issue.
Although Big Medium declares its character encoding in the HTML of the page itself, the web server can override this, causing the current problem. When that happens, the web server basically breaks the display of accented characters.
If your site is on an Apache web server, the problem is likely a setting in the server's httpd.conf configuration file that looks like this:
AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1
It should be changed to:
AddDefaultCharset Off
In Linux systems, the httpd.conf file is often located here:
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
If none of this makes sense to you, or if you don't have access to the httpd.conf configuration file, check with your server administrator for help.
If he or she is unwilling to make this change, you can also do it yourself via your site's .htaccess file, if it's enabled for your Apache server. Check to see if there's a file in your server's main web directory named .htaccess. If so, add the following line to it:
AddDefaultCharset Off
If not, create a file named .htaccess that consists only of the above line, and upload it to your site's main web directory.