I have a problem with german umlauts in OpenEMR forms. A form created with formscript.pl doesn’t display umlauts right when used in fixed strings like radio button description. Only when entered in text fields they are displayed right. When re-editing the forms the text fields umlauts are immediately broken though.
I have used General character set configuration on inital OEMR installation and I don’t know how to change that without re-installing. I would want to test this though. The version I use is SVN development version of 21.11.2009.
Since version 3.1.0 release, the character set of database is pure UTF-8, so your umlauts are supported. In your custom forms, it is important to have the source code of them all encoded in UTF-8 to ensure compatibility with OpenEMR (also ensure your text editor saves them to UTF8 encoding).
also forgot to mention, General collation (UTF-8 encoding) seleciton on installation is just fine. That selection is really to just choose a collation (ie. alphabetical sorting) method by mysql, and all use UTF-8 encoding. If you choose ‘none’ (do not recommend this) then you would force latin1 encoding.