Data merge for manual with special characters

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
June 5, 2025
2 replies
581 views

Hi I already checked this https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/data-merge-with-special-characters-on-mac/td-p/11217158 but for a manual it does not work.

I work with many languages that uses special characters.

Is there a csv export that indesign allows which keeps this special characters?

Or is there an easy way to replace the characters in numbers for something indesign understands?

If it cannot be solved, is there a good alternative for Data merge? like a plugin?

How to

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Urban2981539519v9Author

Participating Frequently

Solved it with chatgpt, I had to verify the csv with bbedit and then I could do a replace of the ; to a tab /t and save as a utf16 small endian .txt file.
This imports great.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Nooooooo

I mean, I'm glad that worked for you, but it's not a correct answer at all. Likewise, the answer that you found in that other thread is incorrect in your case. Instead of editing incorrectly encoded translations by hand, in languages you cannot read, you should check the "import options" checkbox when selecting your Data Source, and then choose a Unicode encoding.

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Urban2981539519v9Author

Participating Frequently

Yes this is even better! it works, thanks!

Peter Spier

Community Expert

For characters that don't behave in data merge I generally use a substitute text string that will merge and then run find/change to replace that string with the correct character.

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Urban2981539519v9Author

Participating Frequently

I could not do this to replace basically every character by hand for japanese or bulgarian.. But the trick is to import utf 16 txt file.

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