Absurd is the word! I was working on a Mac and sucessfully encoded my IPTC data from Latin1 to UTF8 and was able to read it correctly in many different graphic applications. Back on the PC Xnview and Irfanview show the double byte characters of the UTF8 and it is only Photoshop that interprets them correctly. I read somewhere else in the forums here that the character set used by many programmes is that of the machine - Western European Windows in my case (Latin1).