About text encodings

Text encoding refers to the way that alphabetic characters are stored in a file. If your data is all in English, you generally do not need to worry about text encodings.

Data that has accented Latin characters, or non-Latin characters, must be interpreted according to a particular text encoding. It is possible to specify the text encoding when importing a file using the drop-down box in the file import menu. Magic Maps supports the following text encodings:

If your imported data has some characters that are garbled, try re-importing it using a different text encoding. Shapefiles are usually encoded with Windows-1252; KML files are usually encoded with UTF-8.

See also:


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