pgaccess - international characters

Hello,

I have a Linux server running Debian 2.2 with PostgreSQL 6.5.3. I would
really like to avoid upgrading the Postgres installation as this is
running on a production machine. But if it solves the problem I will of
course do so.

Now we have several Windows workstations using pgaccess to enter data into
several tables. Everything is fine when using forms. International
characters (like the german umlaute) work fine. But when I open the table
directly don't get human readable output for the characters. It varies
from one or several blank characters to "garbage".

A pg_dump on the Linux server shows the same results. But well this is not
so bad, as the stuff can be done using the forms I have written.

Now we want to get the data into an Excel 97 spreadsheet. This shows the
same behaviour as opening the tables directly. And I don't know what to do
about it.

To test it I wrote some records into the table using MS access. This seems
to work. The characters are shown correctly in the pgaccess table view and
the Excel sheet. Even a pg_dump produces human readable characters.

I have created the database with several different encodings: LATIN1, WIN,
ALT and SQL_ASCII. I also tried several combinations with the encodings
and executing a SET CLIENT_ENCODING = "..." in pgaccess. But it didn't
make a difference.

I'm using the ODBC driver v06-50-0000 as my primitive excel sql-function
did not work with version 07_01_0006. Although it still showed the same
symptons with SQL queries using MS query.

How can I convince pgaccess to write the characters in a readable format
into the database? We were using an older pgaccess and tcl version, but I
upgraded to the latest pgaccess and the latest point release of tcl8.3.

Thanks for any help,
Lars

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