I'm working on a project that generates html+css code and generates pdfs from that via prince. In my local ubuntu 13.04 with prince 8.1 rev 3 I can render the texts correctly with all umlauts and special characters.

However in my server environment with ubuntu 10.04 and prince 8.1 rev 5, I can't do that. I checked the input files, and they look like correctly encoded utf-8 files, but the output contains stuff like ü. Encoding to ascii by replacing with xml entities did not help either.

The files will need the old meta charset declaration early in the document head:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">

Or you can switch to our new HTML5 parser with "-i html5" on the command-line; this will be the default for Prince 9.

Thank you a lot, issue solved!