2 replies to this topic

[Dennis McClendon]

I'm working on a map with lots of Spanish names, so I carefully edited and joined an attribute table to include accent marks and tildes. These show up when I view the DBF file on the PC, but when I open the attribute table in ArcMap, they don't show up properly. The finished map on the PC has gaps in the place of any accented letters. When I bring that across to the Mac, I get substituted high-ASCII characters. I suppose I can seek those out, but it seems rather tedious. Surely other people make ArcMap maps using diacriticals, but I don't find anything in the help system or manual. What am I not doing right?

[DaveB]

Dennis,
I did a search on the ESRI support site for "diacritical" and found this suggestion:
try using a unicode font

I hope that helps. If not let me know and I'll see what I can find out (but don't expect to hear much from me next week; ESRI User Conference week, you know).

[Dennis McClendon]

OK, I figured it out. This is pretty geeky, so I'm posting it here.

If you've worked with a DBF file in Excel, chances are it used a different "codepage" (chart of characters and their binary codes) than ArcGIS assumes. By default ArcMap and ArcCatalog reads DBF files in the codepage 1252 (ANSI Latin 1). The solution is to create a file containing nothing but the three characters "850" and give it the same name as your DBF table, but with the extension .CPG

Now ArcGIS will know how to interpret the characters found in your DBF file.

Other relevant codepages to try include 437 (the old US Windows standard) or 10000 (Macintosh). A complete list of codepages for folks in other countries can be found at Microsoft Codepage List

Who would have guessed that I would be contributing to this board's knowledge of GIS . . .