Although data merge correctly reads a tab-separated text file, it breaks German Umlaute (ä, ö, ü) that were read in. This seems to be a common problem without a solution. In the original text the Umlaute are correct, after merging into Indesign they are broken. This seems to be a real bug.
Solutions that I have tried:
Encode the file as UTF-8 - not working after data merge
Encode the file as UTF-16 (breaks the new line characters, not working)
All possible data import options, following the suggestion here (Unicode, ASCII) - not working
Use csv (not working)
This seems like an impossible problem. How can I get this done?
So you get the wrong characters? (This is called mojibake). UTF-8 should be a good choice. What encoding do you choose in InDesign, and what characters does it set for a particular accented character?
UTF-16 LE works with respect to the Umlaute without mojibake (fantastic term), but Indesign then fails to recognize the line breaks, i.e. the import itself fails
Thanks I missed the screen shot. The character sequence ü is exactly what happens (mojibake) when you choose Windows or ISO-1 encoding for information that is actually UTF-8. What app are you saving the file from? What do you get when you choose Unicode for this file (because ASCII must give exactly the results you posted)?
Yeah, I know, that's why I am at a loss why changing the encoding does not solve the problem.
What app are you saving the file from?
Sublime text and save it manually as UTF-8. Should be solid. Sidenote: A weird feature is that although the file is UTF-8 and Sublime Text shows the file as UTF-8, if I open the file in Excel the Umlaute are wrong as well. (WTF!?)
What do you get when you choose Unicode for this file (because ASCII must give exactly the results you posted)?
I mean, choosing Unicode in InDesign. Anyway, please try saving from Excel or similar. It will add something called a "BOM" which often sorts this sort of thing out.
Sight ... been there 😞 Sublime allows me to save as UTF-8 bom or UTF-16 bom, I tried all of them, nothing works. I have the suspicion that the original file is very corrupt, because that's all that remains. I'll try to re-format it by hand. Phew.
Thank you so much for the quick attempt and responses!
this is a common issue with client side delivered files.
Instead of trying to reformat, resave or handing guidelines to our clients we switched to MyDataMerge, an App for macOS (only) with a drag and drop interface (Indesign layout + Excel database or CSV) If you're on that plattform i'd definetely give it a try.
Developed by a german team (as far as i know - it has a german translation), imports excels, exports linebreaks, handles almost every encoding. It basically does all the (annoying) things for you in the background and you can focus on work.
/t5/indesign-discussions/indesign-data-merge-datenzusammenf%C3%BChrung-breaks-german-umlaut-%C3%A4-%C3%B6-%C3%BC-despite-utf-8/m-p/12450141#M448767Oct 14, 2021
Oct 14, 2021
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Just in case this pops up for someone having the same issue (it just did for me).
The hint regarding the source file text being the issue made me think. I copied filenames from the finder (I'm on a mac) into a spreadsheet and saved that as a csv. That gave me the above mentioned problems (ö became o?). So I manually tried to type öäüß into a cell, and that worked. That made me remember I sometimes copy text into a simple text editor to remove the formatting. So I just copied all the cells (you can copy all at once) , pasted them into the built-in text editor on my mac. Then I copied them within the text editor again, and pasted it back into the spreadsheet (again, all at once). Suddenly it all worked.
So to sum things up in case you are confused about my text above:
Copy the cells from your spreadsheet (all at once)
The easiest solution for me was to copy the table (from Google Sheets in my case) completely into the clipboard and then paste it into TextEdit (MAC) unformatted. There you can save the already tabstopped table as ASCII TXT (select in the settings). Works flawlessly and super fast with InDesign.
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