TYPO3 Core

I am not sure but as far as I remember, class attributes may only contain ASCII characters...(?)

then it would be a feature request.-)

I encountered similar problems with german umlauts. As a workaround I am using a locallang xml-file (fileadmin/rtestuff.xml) and then in my rte-config something like this:

RTE.classes {
odd.name = LLL:fileadmin/lang/locallang_rteclasses.xml:odd
even.name = LLL:fileadmin/lang/locallang_rteclasses.xml:even
...
}

This means extra overhead in sites without the need for multilingual labels, but at least they are possible then and it works.

To Michael: The names in css-code might be to cryptic and technical for authors, so you need more descriptive labels in the select lists visible to them.

@Uschi: Can you give me an example of such a label? After all they are primarly class names, not labels. And because of this, the special chars are still a bad solution...

class names can contain any character from document's character set. See:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#adef-class :
---------------
class = cdata-list [CS]
This attribute assigns a class name or set of class names to an element. Any number of elements may be assigned the same class name or names. Multiple class names must be separated by white space characters.
---------------

and http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-cdata :
---------------
CDATA is a sequence of characters from the document character set and may include character entities
---------------

When the backend is forced to utf-8, labels or names directly entered in PageTSConfig are entered as utf-8 ... unless maybe if PageTSConfig is set through some php script. But, if PageTSConfig is set from a php script, the values should be specified through some language file (LLL:EXT:file or LLL:file).

If the values are entered directly in PageTSConfig, $LANG->sL(...) will apply a new conversion if $LANG->origCharset is not utf-8. For many languages, $LANG->origCharset is NOT utf-8.

Fixed in SVN TYPO3core, trunk and TYPO3_4-1 (for inclusion in TYPO3 4.1.3).

Patch set 2 for branch master of project Packages/TYPO3.CMS has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/39349