hello sven, i'm not used to mac systems but i can tell you I usually resolve all the accents problems (for european languages) by using ISO-8859-15 (or ISO-8859-1 if the first is not supported)
did you think about asynchronous generation? prehaps a small cardinality of the reports being generated can allow this way of optimizing the response time
I know google check your user agent ... try something like this URLConnection urlconnection = yahoo.openConnection(); urlconnection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)");