Although I am proud of myself for once using the -C options which are new to you ;-) I now have reverted to not using them after the discussion with karavelov. As shown, my updated approach is to use a :utf8 on the start of each script-cycle and in the few cycles my script outputs image/binary data I tell it to switch to :utf8 on a per-case basis. So I am d'accord with what you are concluding!