> If I create an entry via the web-interface, the defined encoding of the browser is used.
> If I create an entry via "elog", it is always stored in UTF-8 encoding.
> For the text I can overcome that with HTML encoding, but for attribute values the encoding does not show properly.
> The only solution I found was to convert the whole logbook to UTF-8 encoding:
> 
>  define "charset=UTF-8" in elogd.cfg
>  iconv --from-code=ISO-8859-1 --to-code=UTF-8 elogd.cfg >tmp;mv tmp elogd.cfg
>  iconv --from-code=ISO-8859-1 --to-code=UTF-8 resources/eloglang.german >tmp;mv tmp resources/eloglang.german
> 
> Has anyone any idea why ISO8859-1 does not work for me?
> 
> Or can anyone advice me of an editor similar to NEdit that is capable to display UTF-8? :-)

I just tried it submitting to the Demo logbook:

https://midas.psi.ch/elogs/Linux+Demo/15

using some German Umlauts, and saw that it works fine. "elog" does not do any conversion, just submits the text as is. 
If your text is ISO-8859-1 encoded, it will be submitted as such, and your browser will correctly display it. Have you 
tried removing the "charset=UTF-8" from your elogd.cfg?