I gave the original snippit a test.
The mail was in latin1, so I had to convert the file to utf8.
Once I did that texexec and dvips processed it w/o error.
The resulting postscript had the correct accent.
The relevant chunk of the postscript is:
%%Page: 1 1
TeXDict begin 1 0 bop 1738 77 a Fa(1)-
I said:
> Interestingly, if I forget about unicode and use é instead of é,
> then no matter what I put in the preamble I get the e with a guillemot
> superimposed. So whatever is mapping é incorrectly seems also to be
> mapping é incorrectly.
Further testing suggests that my problem is this:
Bet
>>I'm processing some Spanish from Unicode and some of it is in MathML,
>>for which I use ConTeXt's native processing. There seems to be a problem
>>with accents. When I run this on Live:
>>
>>--
>>\mainlanguage[es]\enableregime[utf]\useencoding[uc]
>>\useXMLfilter[utf]\usemodule[mathml]
>>\startt
