Hi there, i'm working with pyhtonnet to use features from itextsharp ( a dotnet pdf library). the purpose of the app is to fill out pdf forms from within a turbogears appserver. i tried several combinations of encodings and passing str/unicode/ SystemString types to a utility function that sets the current pdf-form value with no success. i wrote a c# sample app that loads utf-8 encoded data and processes the pdf. then i ported it to ironpython with no problem (selecting data from sql-db and setting form-values in the pdfstamper). due to the lack of several essential std-lib modules i decided to use pythonnet with mono within a linux/ubuntu server to access the itext library. basically everything is working - except that there is a problem with german umlauts when passing values from result-sets to the dotnet library. the library methods dont accept pure str objects .. when i use unicode (correctly encoded) or SystemString objects the non-ascii chars wont display in the pdf or the resulting pdf is invalid (probably due to wrong encoding). i know that ironpython has a different string implementation .. is there a way how i can access the dotnet library that behaves similar to ironpythons implementation ? any hints would be greatly appreciated thanks! yours Ulrich Eck