Comment 7 for bug 929001

unfortunately, I am having the same problem on Windows XP, Inkscape rev 10966.
<offtopic> the crash with utf-8 encoding on Windows is not necessarily a problem, it just means that some other encoding should have been chosen. For example, if you use the calendar extension and use some non-ascii text and use utf-8 encoding you will (on Windows) get a somewhat more graceful message saying 'You must select a correct system encoding', which means the same as the above crash</offtopic>.

 However, the conversion should work properly with some other encoding like Latin 1. With some non-ascii text, like '¼¾èê' the conversion appears to work with Latin 1. This was confirmed by opening the XML editor and checking the inkscape:label property which contains the text. Other text like 'późną' does not appear to be correct. This was confirmed by running the extension Render->Calendar and confirming that this text was not correct. The Calendar extension has a much wider variety of encodings to choose from, but I was not able to get any of them to convert this text correctly. (I didn't try them all, but I tried about half of them)