### 7.11 International Text Support

Msc-generator supports international text via both UTF-8 and UTF-1622. The type of encoding is determined automatically when the file is loaded. If it is ASCII or valid UTF-8, it is treated as so. Else it is treated as UTF-16. The Windows GUI displays the detected encoding on the status bar. You can change it by double clicking the indicator on the status bar - next time you save the file, it will be saved using the encoding displayed there. Below is an example of a simple chart shown in the language tutorial in my native language, Hungarian.

Note that not all font faces contain characters for all possible unicode codepoints. This has to be considered when selecting a font23. If you mix characters of different languages, you need to ensure that they are displayed via a font that has coverage for all those characters.

In labels, you can use the `\$` escape followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits, to insert any unicode character to a label, e.g., `\$00a9` inserts the copyright symbol.

Note that if you plan to use non-ASCII characters in the chart text you need to select a font that can display them not only in the chart, but also for the internal editor. See Fonts.

#### Footnotes

##### (22)

UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII, where international characters are encoded in multiple bytes all larger than 127 (which is the largest ASCII character). In contrast, in UTF-16 all characters are encoded on two bytes, ASCII and international characters alike. The UTF-16 file usually start by the characters 0xff and 0xfe and their order determines in which order the two bytes of a character comes. UTF-8 is widely used in Linux and other Unix systems, whereas Windows has adopted UTF-16 as the system encoding. Msc-generator supports both file formats and both byte orders of UTF-16.

##### (23)

In signalling charts you can select a font via the `text.font.face` chart option or attribute, in graphs use the `fontname` attribute, whereas in Block Diagrams you need `use text.font.face=<fonname>;`.