First thing to check is that character encoding for everything is utf-8, particularly your database.

Most software defaults to utf-8 these days, but all it takes is one exception in a chain and characters can become lost or corrupted.

Sorting out the above is the proper way to solve it because if you get the problem for umlauts now, you will get it for other utf-8 characters later.

For a quick soultion you could also try directly coding an html character escape sequence into your heading. See:

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_13.html...
or tarted up:
http://www.escapecodes.info/

For an umlaut, you use: ¨ "& # 1 6 8 ;" (remove the spaces)

However, such html coding often disappears through a repeated edit/save/edit again, so you may have to re-enter it every time you edit (you can see it just before where I put the coding spaced out above)

Thank you for the answer!

My database is UTF-8.

I had a similar problem before: When i wrote in a content, the umlauts didn't show correctly. I solved the problem with adding the line in the .htaccess and it worked fine.

So I don't understand the problem with the headings.

I tried your solution, but it didn't work.

Have you another solution?

Sorry I can't help any further.

I have also gone round in many circles chasing such problems. I suspect there are issues with utf-8 in some versions of php.

Maybe one of the internationalisation experts can provide an answer.

If you want to write code, I find this library can patch up many utf-8 problems:
https://github.com/neitanod/forceutf8...

i always succeeded in adding " the default character directive " having this problem with german translations (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset... )

if only your headings are affected, … do you use a "webfont ?" ... and did you check if they are latin-extended ?