[eluser]tomcode[/eluser]
I do not know what You mean by character tables, if You mean fonts, no, the fonts are the ones of the visitor's machine, there are no fonts installed on the server.
Your server sends (by default) an instruction to the browser, which character encoding to use (in Your case ISO-8859-1).
You have now two possibilites :
1. Send a header in Your PHP with utf-8
2. As You have already, put a meta tag into Your page, but this meta may not be recognized as long as the markup contains too many errors.
Code:
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
