This is a problem I've been having since day 1 that has to do with character encoding I believe. Until now, it was a minor inconvenient, but as we want to use more features (incl. letter merge), it's now geting in the way big time.
It's once again related to those special characters ("e" with an accute accent for example) that some of us use in their native language. When I export data from within OD (using the Export button in a report or exporting the datafile for a letter merge for example), those accented characters, even though they are perfectly correct in OD (and on printed reports), come out completely wrong in the exported text file. Here is an example: "66, place Lévis" becomes "66, place Lévis".
I suppose it has to do with UTF-8 to iso 8859-1 conversion when the data is exported. I've tried to change the default encoding using Navicat on my test database, without success. I'd like to get it to work properly as I want our staff to start using the letter merge function and I'm also adding some functionality for tailoring recall/confirmation postcards in OO Writer.