WRT UTF-8 support for "↓↓ Convert Document / Selection to PDF" I modified the command by piping it through iconv like this:
MultiMarkdown.pl "$NAME" |SmartyPants.pl|iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-15 >"$DST.html"
The PDF output had the relevant characters: ä, ö, ü, etc, though the html preview was messed up. (But why is that there anyway?)
Best, Mark