STENZEL@xxxxxxxxxx writes:
 > well as HTML from the same Docbook source. Being german I occasionally
 > would like to have an umlaut character in my documents. How would I make
 > the switch automatically that in the HTML output I have an 'ä' for ä
 > and in the Latex output a '\"a' for ä ??

Don't use \"a in the LaTeX, its widely deprecated. Use Latin1 encoding
in both the HTML and LaTeX, and use the appropriate "inputenc" package
in LaTeX

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