Yeah, we really do have problems with our Umlauts and the "ß" ("s z", for things like "Straße" (street), because it isn't a "Strasse" or a "Strasze" - differen pronunciation; German writing Swiss do not use the "ß"). But that's not only a problem of Germans. French (and others) have problems with accents, people from northern European countries have problems with Eth, O with slash, A with - hm - ring?bubble?don'tknow ... Best solution would be a full unicode support for Sketchup. Ruby also has unicode support, but that also means, that you have to program with a unicode editor. For the Ruby interpreter you have the option "-K" - so it's "ruby -Ku ascript.rb" or you put on top of your main script:
$KCODE = 'u'
require 'jcode'
azuby