If you are trying to use non-English characters in your text, such as Greek, and the characters are display as "?????", your database table's fields' collation may need to be changed to utf8_unicode_ci.
How to check the collation and change it if necessary:
1. Go to the phpmyadmin. If your webhost provides a cpanel, you will find a link there. If your webhost provides another type of control panel, you should be able to find a link to phpmyadmin or "My Databases", etc. Contact your webhost if you need more help in finding this.
2. When you open phpmyadmin, you will see a list of databases on the left side. If you have more than one (not counting "information_schema" which would not be your Joomla database), then you need to check which database your Joomla site is using. You can see this in Joomla's Global Configuration -> Server.
3. Click on the database and the list of tables in the database will show on the left side. Click on the "jos_content" table. (The default prefix for database tables is "jos_" but it is possible yours may be different.)
4. Click on the "Structure" tab. Look at the "Collation" column. The collation should be blank (for non-text data fields) or utf8_unicode_ci for text fields. In the fields "intro_text" or "full_text", if there is something else, such as "latin1_swedish_ci", click on the edit icon for that field (the pencil icon) and change the collation to "utf8_unicode_ci" and save.
5. Now try typing in Greek text in an article, save it, and see if it is now displaying the chacters correctly.
6. If this worked and you want to change the collation throughout your database all at once, do the following in phpMyAdmin (it is recommended that you try this on a test system first!):
a. Click on the database.
b. Click on the Export tab.
c. In the Structure section, check the box for "Add DROP TABLE ..." and uncheck "Add IF NOT EXISTS".
d. Click Go and Save the file.
e. Open a copy of the file (keep the original intact just in case!) using a plain text editor like NotePad or EditPlus (not Word). Replace all "COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci" (or whatever your Collate is set to), with "COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci". Also change "COLLATE=latin1_swedish_ci" to "COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci".
f. Save the file and import back into phpMyAdmin by clicking on the Import tab and uploading the file.
g. If anything goes wrong with the import of the new file, reinstall the original exported file.
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