Can I view non-English characters in the FME Viewer

From Fmepedia

Q) Can I view non-English characters in the FME Viewer?

A) Yes. There are two different methods.

1) If your computer is set up as a locale that includes non-English characters then these should be visible automatically. If you need to do this for only a short time - say for testing purposes - then there is a Microsoft tool (http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/apploc.mspx) that will run applications as if they were in a different locale.

2) With FME2007 or newer the FME Viewer will automatically display attributes in non-system encodings properly. For instance, Shapefiles with unicode attributes will show properly no matter what locale your system is in. There are, of course, a number of provisions:

i) The machine must have a suitable font installed to display the characters.

ii) The format and reader must support this functionality.

iii) The source dataset must have the codepage defined within it - or else the user must define it using a workspace or mapping file.

Above: Japanese attribute as shown in the FME Viewer. The fake data is a line from HHGTTG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hhgttg) converted using FreeTranslation.com (http://www.freetranslation.com)!

Keywords: character encoding, BOM, Unicode, font