If you look at this... http://genetsim.org/class/gaw15_problem_3_papers.html ...you'll see that it is messing up the UTF-8 characters, at least in Firefox on Linux and Chrome on Windows: Bickeböller Josée But the identical page here is fine: http://mlug.missouri.edu/~mbmiller/temp/gaw15_paper_page.html Bickeböller Josée I was having the same problem on both machines until I added this line in the header: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> That only fixed it on one Apache web server, not the other. So why doesn't that fix it for both servers? I assume it has something to do with the Apache configuration. Any ideas? A friend looked into it and told me "Your broken apache server is sending: Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 missouri.edu is sending: Content-Type: text/html Look and see if AddDefaultCharset is set somewhere in your config. If not it may be set under an AddType directive." So I checked and found that AddDefaultCharset is there on the genetsim.org machine in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf: # Specify a default charset for all pages sent out. This is # always a good idea and opens the door for future internationalisation # of your web site, should you ever want it. Specifying it as # a default does little harm; as the standard dictates that a page # is in iso-8859-1 (latin1) unless specified otherwise i.e. you # are merely stating the obvious. There are also some security # reasons in browsers, related to javascript and URL parsing # which encourage you to always set a default char set. # AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1 But it is commented out on mlug in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf: #AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1 It seems strange that Apache's comment text tells us that this is "always a good idea" that "does little harm" and it improves security. It says that a page is "in iso-8859-1 (latin1) unless specified otherwise," but that seems to imply that I can specify otherwise. Of course, that is exactly what I thought I was doing with this line in the header: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> Do you know why I'm not able to override the default here? The machines do differ in version number: genetsim.org: $ /usr/sbin/httpd -v Server version: Apache/2.0.46 Server built: Oct 28 2008 07:02:48 mlug.missouri.edu: $ /usr/sbin/apache2 -v Server version: Apache/2.2.3 Server built: Nov 13 2009 15:16:06 Best, Mike