The default character encoding is ISO-8859-1. To alter this, simply add the encoding to the end of the content-type line in your flavour's content_type.{flavour} file. For example, to specify that your default HTML is UTF-8 encoded, your content_type.html should look like:
text/html; charset=UTF-8Author: Rael Dornfest
Category: /faq/header/encoding
Date: 2003-07-27