If you are having problems displaying special characters in your file you can try defining them in configuration file. Here http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/trunk/output.html#afp-configuration you might find how to do it. Also make sure you have path to your fonts directory correctly specified. In Windows it should look something like that:
<fonts>
<directory recursive="true">C:\Windows\Fonts</directory>
<auto-detect/>
</fonts>