if i understand you right, the charset problem doesn’t happen with my plugin?! (maybe i got you wrong, but your short request was posted under my image-replacement article… so…)

if the problem you have is that these characters aren’t available with utf-8 you should check the mimetype.php included with this theme. maybe i should have explained better… but the reason for this additional file is: i wanted my theme to be served as xhtml 1.1 correctly. saying: with the mimetype “application/xhtml+xml”. thats why the mimetype negotiation is needed. as the charset info isn’t only in the “meta”(content)-tag but also declared within the html-element, its necessary to change this value in mimetype.php to your needs, hope this helps
and kind regards, erik

ps: just another hint: maybe you want to delete the empty-span element from the single.php’s headline and also the inline-style from h3 within the same document because “not using” my plugin makes links on that page unclickable (see the themes documentation for info on this)