 <p>If you really mean ASCII, you can't possibly rescue Hebrew characters. ASCII is only the 7-bit character set up to <code>\x7F</code>.</p> <p>So what kind of strings does this Windows program read? If it's ASCII, or Latin-1, you'll never get Hebrew. More likely it's “the current system code page”, also (misleadingly but commonly) known in Windows as ‘ANSI’.</p> <p>If that's the case you will have to set the system code page on every machine that runs the Windows program to Hebrew (code page 1255). I believe shp files have no character encoding information at all, so the shapefiles will only ever work correctly on machines with this code page set (the default only in the Israel locale). (Apparently <code>.dbf</code> exports can have an accompanying <code>.cpg</code> file to specify the encoding, but I've no idea if the program you're using supports that.)</p> <p>Then you'd have to export the data as code page 1255, or the nearest you're going to get in Postgres, ISO-8859-8. Since the export script doesn't seem to have any option to do anything but take direct bytes from the database, you'd have to create a database in the ISO-8859-8 encoding and transfer all the data from the UTF-8 database to the 8859-8 one, either directly through queries or, perhaps easier, using <code>pgdumpall</code> and loading the SQL into Notepad then re-saving it as Hebrew instead of UTF-8 (adjusting any encoding settings listed in SQL DDL as you go).</p> <p>I wonder if the makers of the Windows program could be persuaded to support UTF-8? It's a bit sad to be stuck with code-page specific software in this century.</p>