Multibyte support and accented characters

Hello all,

Can you handle one more question from me? Not related to keyword checkboxes
this time, promise. :-)

Some of the text that will be entered in the database I'm working on
includes some names and titles in other languages - predominantly French,
but occasionally German, Spanish, etc. So I understand from reading the
PostgreSQL docs that in order to handle this, we need to make sure multibyte
support is enabled.

Now, I am not very clear on the various encodings and how they work. I've
been spoiled by years of working on a Mac where you just type option-e if
you want an acute accent, option-u for an umlaut, etc. That's how most of
the text that will be used to populate the database has been generated. So
my questions are:

1. Which encoding would be best for this? I'm guessing Unicode, but I'm not
sure. We pretty much only have to deal with western European languages, not
with Russian or Chinese or anything.

2. Once the right one is chosen and enabled, is the process pretty much
transparent - i.e., just enter the text and the accented characters will
come through fine, or do I have to do something special with them, like the
way they have to be encoded with &...; ASCII codes in HTML?

3. Speaking of HTML, even if PostgreSQL is set up to correctly deal with
accented characters, when the output is displayed on the web, are they going
to have to be converted into &...; form?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Lynna
--
Resource Centre Database Coordinator
Gallery 44
www.gallery44.org