the to_from is dropping off the accented character and everything after it ... Terán becomes Ter ...

and yes, PDFlib is an external library. i suspect the problem essentially lies there ... not being too well versed in character set issues, i'm not sure what the system default is. i could force PDFlib to use another character set (by pulling in pdflib_pm and forcing a value into <code> $pdflib_pm:PDF_character_enc