How do I support Romanian diacritics (ș/ț/ă/â/î) properly in Magento?

This is one of the most common Romanian Magento bugs, incorrectly encoded diacritics showing as ? or Ã in product names, customer addresses, transactional emails, and invoice PDFs.

Three layers to get right:

1. MySQL collation, the database must use utf8mb4_unicode_ci (Magento default) or ideally utf8mb4_romanian_ci for the customer-name / product-name columns. utf8 alone (3-byte) breaks on some symbols. Convert with ALTER TABLE ... CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4.
2. PHP / Magento config, app/etc/env.php must specify the charset, default_charset in php.ini should be UTF-8, and Magento\Framework\Locale must be configured for ro_RO.
3. Output layer, HTML <meta charset="utf-8">, email templates set as UTF-8 (not Latin-2 or Windows-1250 which some legacy ESPs default to), PDF invoices generated with TCPDF or DOMPDF must explicitly embed a font that includes Romanian glyphs (DejaVu Sans is the safe pick; Helvetica doesn’t cover them).

We audit all 3 layers + run a diacritics-stress-test (sample order with name “&Ș;tefân Țicleanu”) on every RO build before launch.