# XBMC special characters



## Emil (Dec 17, 2011)

Hi,

XBMC doesn't display special characters (i.e. Å) correctly. Other programs (like my browser or my file manager) do display these characters correctly.

I already tried to add things like 

```
:charset=UTF-8:\
    :lang=en_US.UTF-8:
```
to my login.conf without success.

I also tried some other languages and character sets in the appearance > international settings menu, but the problem stays.

I'm using FreeBSD 8.2, XBMC 10.1_3 from the ports and Gnome 2.32.1.


----------



## MicroserverGuy (Dec 18, 2011)

I think you're on the right track.

I believe using [cmd=]setenv LANG en_AU.UTF-8[/cmd] prior to running xbmc solved it for me (see http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2010-October/063968.html).

If that doesn't help I'll poke around and see what else I might have done.


----------



## Emil (Dec 18, 2011)

Neither en_AU.UTF-8 nor fr_FR.UTF-8 solve my problem.
Every special character is replaced by "Ã‚" + the character or a square. According to Google that would mean XBMC is displaying UTF-8 encoded text as if it was ISO-8859-1 encoded.


----------



## T-Daemon (Dec 18, 2011)

Take a look at this document and try this fix. arialuni.ttf (about 20MB) can be found on the web if no Windows platform is available. I'm not sure, but I think the corresponding ../media/Fonts (Fonts with capital F) directory on FreeBSD is under /usr/local/share/xbmc/.


----------



## Emil (Dec 23, 2011)

Using that fix doesn't make a difference. I also checked the default font of the skin I'm using, and it has the needed characters.


----------



## Emil (Jan 6, 2012)

I checked the xbmc.log file (I first didn't think there would be some clue in the log file about this) and this error looks like it has something to do with my problem:


```
13:43:08 T:34569470400 M:7164878848   ERROR: convert_checked failed from UTF-8 to WCHAR_T, errno=86
13:43:08 T:34569470400 M:7164870656   ERROR: convert_checked failed from WCHAR_T to UTF-8, errno=86
```
These lines are repeated about 2-3 times per second.


----------

