Hi Steve, thanks a lot for pointing at the problem, you guessed the right fact. I had a look on the files on another PC with notepad++ - the coding of all files was ANSI. I saved them another time with my systems notepad as utf-8 - and got ansi again (maybe due to all characters belong to the ansi charset). Now I swapped my editor to notepad++ and mkgmap runs as expected. I'm happy :-) Thanks