Best way to deal with special characters in data

[Lady Bug]

Mac Platform, uCreate Print 6.5.

Problem:

Accent characters in data displaying as a box in InDesign.
Offending character (in this job) is a tilde over an “a”.

Viewing the character on a PC in UltraEdit looks like “<” instead of an “a”.
Viewing the character in Excel looks like “<” instead of an “a”.
Viewing the character in Mac text edit looks like it is supposed to.

If I do a find and replace in UltraEdit and change the character in the data file using the proper Alt Code, 0227, and save it as a UTF-16, it changes and correctly displays in my XMPie document. I tried several ways and this one is the only one that worked.

The data is being supplied as .txt files and is supposed to be in UTF-8 format.

Is there a better way to do this? How am I to know what variety of characters may be in my data and how do I catch them all? Should I have my data people do something different? I also get CSV files from them.

Thanks!

[Ben Hofer]

I had to save the file(TXT or CSV) as a : UTF-16 BE with BOM for all the characters to properly import (Bullets and french accent characters etc).

Grab a copy of Sublime Text and change the encoding with "File > Save with Encoding>UTF-16 BE with BOM"

That did the trick for me: )

Ben

On Saturday, 17 May 2014 00:02:53 UTC-4, couch wrote:

Your only option on Mac is with .txt or .csv files.

To save the text file on windows you should find an option for "unicode" or utf-8 which should work OK when moved to the Mac.