iconv() problem

Greetings, I have a problem with iconv(), and I need help solving it. Here is the background: I have a Web page with a Form that saves data to a MySQL database. I need to retrieve the data from the database and create a PDF document with FPDF. The Web Page, the database, and the browser are all set to UTF-8, so I have to convert the data from the database to ISO-8859-1 in order to have FPDF show it correctly. I am using iconv() to convert the data. It works like a charm for the data acquired with text boxes, but it does not parse the data acquired from textareas correctly. For example: I have an text input (<input type="text" />) and a textarea (<textarea></textarea>). I type the string "sometextàèìòùésomeothertext" on both the input fields and save it into the database through POST. If I retrieve the data and show it on a web page, it shows correctly. I then create the PDF with FPDF parsing the data with the following instructions: iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", $inputText) iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $textarea) or iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", $textarea) The PDF shows the first record correctly, while the second only shows "sometext" If I use iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE", $textarea) the PDF shows "sometextsomeothertext" skipping all the special chars. Why is the textarea behaving differently than the text input? Is there a way to fix this? I would really appreciate any help, thank you. Stefano