well, here's the problem that i had: my charset (koi8-u) was specified in elog.conf for every logbook, but this had no effect, and all elog pages continued tu appeared as iso-8859-1 (which is the default)

when i specified charset in the global section, the problem's gone away.

2do: i think it's worth testing how does it work whet charset specified for a separate logbook overrides globally specidied charset

elog version that is in use: 2.5.7 from debian sarge 3.1 r0a powerpc