Hi Richard,

Firsly, thanks for the reply!

> First of all, I am curious. Why are you converting? If the text is already
> in UTF-8 why is there a need to down-convert? I am not familiar enough
> with the internals of PDF, but are there issues with using UTF-8 specifically
> with PDF?

I'm using RPDF and it has never coped with UTF-8 text, therefore I
convert to Latin.

> It looks like that PDF is 8859-1. It looks like it ignored your
> request to translate
> to Latin-2, or your PDF viewer is assuming that it is latin-1. The
> Polish characters are mapped to various western european ones instead.
> Double check that the characters
> in your database were entered as UTF-8 (the Polish-specific characters will be 2
> bytes not 1).

I have a feeling it might be in the database now, as I observed that
the text looks strange even in the MySQL query tool. However, if I
manually enter some text through the tool, it appears ok. See the
bottom entry entitled 'test' here
http://www.tobinharris.com/media/mtq38_db.jpg. The test is ok, but all
the other stuff entered by the client through the web site is not.

If characters in the DB are not UTF-8, is there any way to convert them
or is the information lost forever?

Many thanks

Tobin