I'm currently getting into the Symfony framework and I can definitly say that I like it.

But as my site was finished after only some hours I had a problem concerning the display of special characters like the umlauts (ä, ö, ü) aso. I don't use a database created by SF/Propel but use an existing one with latin1_* encoding (the default TYPO3 db encoding). Unfortunatly all umlauts where displayed as questionmark so I started finding an solution. The characters are fuzzy because they were not correctly returned by propel. I tried all configuration directives I found (setting the encoding of the connection to utf-8 aso) but nothing worked.
Finally I found a snippet that fixes the problem for me: Setting UTF-8 for Propel with MySQL tables and now everything is just fine!