I am testing a site on my machine and also on the Internet, but the accented characters of foreign languages do not render correctly on either.

I use Iceweasel and GEDIT both set up for UTF-8.

Is my apache2 config file the culprit? Is apache on my machine used when I access the site on the Internet?

Can anyone point me to what I should look for?

Thank you for your help.

No, Apache is a web server, it doesn't access anything online.

I would say the most likely causes is that you dont have the correct fonts installed. Go and find some fonts that have these special chars, then install them. On my Gentoo system, unicode fonts are found in the "efont" package.

Thank you for your answer.
Because the result was the same when testing on my machine than when downloading from the internet host, I assumed this was due to the same problem. There was 2 problems.
I found I had a mistake in the meta tag of the html with the charset defined as ISO-8859-1, changing that to UTF-8 solved the problem on my machine but I still had the problem from the internet host.
I found when uploading to the internet host, the correct accented characters are mangled and the page stored becomes the problem.

I will follow this up with the host but if anyone has any comment, that is most welcome.