Hi Theodor, Thanks for the reply I've tried a test report out of ireports with output as html,pdf, jasperViewer and they don´t show the characters ("?" are only in PDF, the others have square symbols). Our main application where we run the reports is a delphi.exe where we create a XML parameter file and pass it to tomcat which executes the report files (thos include the select statements). sessions are being used of the delphi application which runs with ISO-8859-2 I have checked settings on pretty all sides (DB,delphi,tomcat,windows) to make sure i have my ISO-8859-2 anywhere but running out of ideas.... Thanks