Looks definitely like utf-8 data not passed as such. Try

use Encode qw(from_to);

...

while($r = $sth->fetchrow_hashref()) {
    from_to($r->{$_},"utf8","latin1") for keys %$r;
}
[download]

or such, and try with iso8859-1. How did the iso10646-1 font work?

I have no experience with pdflib and PDF::Template (is pdflib an external library?) and there might be more settings that interfere, e.g. what is your systems default charset? Is the charset of your shell the system charset, or does it differ?

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}