Hi @celuloide,
The above settings posted by @rensousa are correct. You have invalid settings for both connection_charset and database_charset. The charset_normalization setting has been removed so it’s not doing anything.
The invalid settings are going to the third-party ADODB library; I’m not sure what its behaviour is when it gets a setting it doesn’t understand, but at a guess, I suspect it connect using the database default character set.
I would suggest taking a complete backup before you tinker with character sets, since it’s really easy to mix two configurations together by experimenting with this, but very hard to resolve that once it’s happened. Consistency is key.
If you set everything as it’s supposed to be, but you’re still seeing garbled characters like ó, then it’s likely that the database is incorrectly encoded in the database. This is more of a database management issue than an OJS issue, so you might have better luck looking e.g. on Stackoverflow.com – or maybe try a tool like ftfy.
If you use the configuration recommended above, and your database contents are correctly encoded, then everything should work – if not, it’ll be one of the two problems.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team