Trouble displaying special characters when importing data to pdf form

Yeah exactly. I type the characters I want in the fields and they look find and then export and the text file looks fine and then import again and special characters are not displayed correctly.

I've tried with the built in Import Form Data command, and with the following script, which I want to eventually get working so that I can do batch imports:

/* Batch Import and Save */

var fileName = "/Users/rightsup/Documents/newlabels.txt"; // the tab delimited text file containing the data

var outputDir = "/Users/rightsup/Documents/BatchImportTrials/"; 

var err = 0;

var idx = 0;

var str = "";

while (err == 0) {

  err = this.importTextData(fileName, idx);

  if (err == -1)

  app.alert("Error: Cannot Open File");

  else if (err == -2)

  app.alert("Error: Cannot Load Data");

  else if (err == 1)

  app.alert("Warning: User Cancelled File Select");

  else if (err == 2)

  app.alert("Warning: User Cancelled Row Select");

  else if (err == 3)

  app.alert("Warning: Missing Data");

  else if (err == 0)

        str = this.getField("LabelName").value;

        str = str.replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/g, '');

  this.saveAs(outputDir + str + ".pdf");

  idx++;

}

It is a super simple PDF form with just three fields, each set to Helvetica. The .txt file was originally in Excel, and then saved as a tab-delimited file. I also tried saving it from Open Office as a tab-delimited file with uff-8 encoding, which does change the appearance of the special characters on my pdf form, but still not to display the correct ones.