utf 8 problem

[Peter Smerdon]

Hi folks,

I have a somewhat general understanding of what utf-8 is but do not
understand all the ins and outs of character encoding and how to set it
up correctly on my computer.

I am simply looking to have gnus use special characters to denote thread
roots, leafs etc..

in my .gnus I have:

(setq gnus-sum-thread-tree-root "►")
(setq gnus-sum-thread-tree-leaf-with-other "├─►")
(setq gnus-sum-thread-tree-single-leaf "└─►")
(setq gnus-sum-thread-tree-vertical "│")
(setq gnus-sum-thread-tree-single-indent " ")

Now I can read these in emacs without a problem, so I am assuming
(perhaps wrongly) that emacs understands these characters and displays
them properly. But if I start gnus, when entering a group with threads,
only the root arrow is displayed, the rest of the characters are square
blocks (I'm guessing a default symbol that is displayed when things go
wrong)

in my .gnus I have (setq gnus-default-charset 'utf-8) and like I said if
I open my .gnus in emacs I can see these characters fine, but in gnus I
cannot see them. I have tried several different fonts in my .Xresources 
(Emacs.font: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-8
 or Emacs*font: Monospace-8) but none seem to work.

my emacs version is the ubuntu emacs-snapshot package:
GNU Emacs 23.0.60.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.12.9) of
2008-03-19 on yellow, modified by Debian

my Gnus version bundled with emacs-snapshot is:
Gnus v5.13

My locale (if that matters):
[peter@thruxton:~]% locale charmap                   
UTF-8 

I would appreciate if someone could show me how to use these utf 8
characters when using Gnus.

Thank you!
-- 

Peter.