I have a Spanish writer that sends me articles in a MS Word Doc file. Normally I cut and paste these on to the web page and upload them to a Windows servers on an aspx file. This works fine, the characters get rendered correctly by the browsers. I started doing the same thing on php pages on a linux server. Here is an example of a page with the problem. http://www.officevideoconferencing.com/es-espanol/videoconferencias-razones-seguridad/ Is this an issue with php, linux or what. At this point it looks like I'll have to replace every Spanish character with the html equivalent. This is something I don't have to do with my windows/aspx combination.
On the website try changing your charset from iso-8859-1 to to UTF-8 in the meta tag. Also check the webserver is sending out the correct charset header.
Yes, you can do that. Check your web for UTF-8 in the Meta Tag. It is important you can make this change becasue it is important for Spanish grammar.