How do I get accents to display correctly?

Let’s get one thing straight. If you’re still using ISO-* shit to have compatibility with people that aren’t using UTF-8 yet, they will never upgrade.. Just use UTF-8 and so we all can use the most modern character encoding… and get on with our lives.

Like the XChat guys say:

Use Unicode ( UTF-8 ) and tell all your friends to use Unicode. Problem solved!

Using UTF 8 on your web page is as simply as including this tag on the head section: 

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

And on a general Debian/Debian-based Linux system for using UTF-8 within applications issue: 

# dpkg-reconfigure locales

and select UTF 8 if it’s not yet enabled.

Ubuntu users see here.

“Just do it”.