In KDE there is a way to add another keyboard layout. When active, there is a flag in my System Tray that I can click on and it cycles through the flags of various languages that I have set up. Ok, well only Spanish and English so far

When I have it set to Spanish I can type the accents and other things just fine. But if I save file names or metadata information (for music) with these characters it produces errors in that name/data. Same if I send an email in GMail using Firefox; it looks fine on my screen, but when I hit send I get all kinds of odd characters (and it drives the recipient nuts)(his emails appear flawless on my screen)

For example:
"¿qué tal estás?"
should say
"que' tal esta's?" (with accents on the letters, not apostrophies)

and "¿dos años?" should read
"dos an~os" (with a tilde on the 'n')

Where is this error? Is it a Unix/DOS mismatch somewhere (even though its all Linux on my machine, and through GMail too i believe). Is there a Unicode checkmark box thing in KDE that I am missing? It seems to me there is a standard not being supported somewhere.

Thanks for any information or pointers

When I first started using linux, I remember being astonished when, one day, I ended up at a Thai or Chinese website, and all the local fonts were rendered perfectly (not that I could read them!). I was used to windows & IE displaying a line of empty boxes when it couldn't render the non-roman font.

So linux seems to have better international support right out-of-the-box. I expect this is a unicode thing. Are you sending these emails to a linux box, or a microsoft one? As you say everything looks good on your box, it could well be a windows problem, and as I no longer use windows, I have no idea how to enable unicode support for it.

HTH

yeah i am always happy when other character sets appear correctly. but this is just local to my box i think, since saving a a musician's name as Jose' (accent) will appear all funky next time i try to pull it up.

my emails appear fine until i hit [send] and then i go look at them in my Sent folder and they're all wrong.