first of all i'd like to say that greenstone is really great; i just
learned about it a few weeks ago, but it's really powerful and fun
working with it.

at least that's what i like to think, because in fact i wasn't
really able to start having fun due to a major problem which i hope
somebody can help me with.

namely, i'm working with gsdl 2.50 under suse linux 9.0 with default
charmap ISO-8859-1 (LANG=en_US).

i have to build a collection from plain text files which contain
non-ascii characters - originally they are encoded in ISO-8859-1
(windows ansi).

the problem now is that i use these files to create a metadata.xml
by extracting text and inserting it into meta tags. as a consequence
this yields a "not well formed" metadata.xml!

i have been trying to get around this problem for several weeks now,
but i just don't get it done properly :-(
(the most promising attempt was to perform conversions at different
points in the process, but on the whole database this didn't work
either)

i'd be glad, if someone could give me a hint...

...thanks in advance

jens wille