> The way to go seems to be to teach the JVM the default character set.
> It appears to me that something like -Dfile.encoding=ISO-8859-1 is
> ignored under Blackdown Java 1.4.2.

According to the Java specification "file.encoding" property is
readonly. Sun and IBM allow changing it, but it seems that Blackdown
is stricter. :(

> export LC_CTYPE=ISO-Latin-1 also does not seem
> to have any effect (under SuSE Linux 8.1). This is no longer a topic
> for this list, I guess, but if anyone can give me a hint...

try export LANG=ISO-8859-1

Also what is the output of "locale -a" command on your Suse? You have
to have that locale installed.

Roman