I don't know what the '?' was. Possibly it's latin-1 which might still be possible. But imagemagick want utf-8, at least can accept that.
Sorry, it was a "latin small letter e with diaeresis". This letter is part of utf-8 also, isn't it? I've tried another more exotic letter, but that one returned a strange character. But that might also be a problem of the font not supporting this letter. At least is does more than ASCII only.
And how do you make the image?
<img src="<mm:image template="part(0,0,385,50)+font(mm:fonts/intranet.ttf)+fill(ed1b2f)+f(gif)+pointsize(25)+text(0,41,'text test')"/>" border="0">
Jaco
