I've never used PDF::EasyPDF but I do know that PDF and Unicode are not inherently friendly. PDF has knowledge of a number of 'built-in' fonts. These font's are all addressed using Latin-1 (or variants of Latin-1 like Mac Roman).

One implication of this is that if the characters you want to print are included in iso-8859-1 (your example suggests they are) then you might get away with passing PDF::EasyPDF a Latin-1 encoded string rather than Perl's native UTF-8 strings.

A second implication is that if the characters you want to print are not included in iso-8859-1 then it will be necessary to embed a font in your document. Embedded fonts can be addressed in a way that allows access to non Latin-1 characters.

The PDF::Reuse module supports embedding TrueType fonts and transparently converting from native Perl strings to a PDF encoding.