Hi, basically {*template charset=UTF-8*} in the template has no effect on the output, as far as I know this is only for EzP to pass the template code, Latin1 is the default template code and I'd suggest you don't change this unless its imperative, though I'm not sure what effect it actually has.
If you only need to encode a string I'd say you will have to write a PHP function for that particular string and maybe add some info to settings/template.ini to initialise the string conversion (don't ask me how), otherwise I'd go with Björn's suggestion, but thats as much as I know!
