Character Conversion - Mac user with funny symbols

[Millipede]

Firstly, I must say that I know or understand very little if anything about char sets :blush:

We're using RSS Import on the forum to import some articles from a Joomla site we have. Some of these articles are entered into Joomla by a Mac user who copies and pastes them from Adobe InDesign. When these particular articles are pulled into the forum's RSS feed, apostrophes, curly/smart quotes and long dashes (which InDesign uses instead of "normal" dashes/hyphens) show up as funny little squares with what looks like a little pattern in them instead. But if he copies and pastes directly into the forum, the characters are OK and don't turn into funny looking squares.

The Joomla site uses the iso-8859-1 char set, and the forum uses the UTF-8 char set as per default. Might this have something to do with it? If so, should I change the system setting "Server Environment -> Character Conversion Method" to something other than the default "internal"?

[Robulosity2]

You'll probably want to convert the Joomla sites database to use utf-8 (using mixed character sets, usually doesn't end well).. I haven't done a lot of work in Joomla in the last few years so I wouldn't really be able to give you the help on that one but some one on their community should be able to give you a good step by step.. Always make sure to back up before doing changes like this

[Millipede]

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about PHP and databases to know how to do that. Looking in phpMyAdmin, the "home" page says "MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)". It's the template of the Joomla site that contains:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;>charset=iso-8859-1" />

But if I changed it (by whatever means), then wouldn't those symbols pasted in by a Mac user from InDesign into the Joomla site then show on the Joomla site instead?

At some point, we're going to possibly move to Wordpress instead, so it might be a mute point in the future. It's only for now, in whatever the forum imports from the Joomla site using RSS import, that it happens. It doesn't happen on the Joomla site, only in the RSS imports in the forum.