# Characters not appearing in external text files

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/characters-not-appearing-in-external-text-files/190917>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [June 15, 2006, 5:15pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/characters-not-appearing-in-external-text-files/190917 "2006-06-15T17:15:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![misterpatrick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/da6949/32.png) [@misterpatrick](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/misterpatrick)\
**Post date:** [June 15, 2006, 5:15pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/characters-not-appearing-in-external-text-files/190917/1 "2006-06-15T17:15:43Z")

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Hello all,

I’ve posed this question before but have yet to find a good solutuion. I have the problem using either external text files, or loading text from an XML file. Doesn’t matter if the font is embedded with special characters or not. Basically, many non-letter characters such as % & # + are not showing up. I end up with nothing for that character. For the text file it can be fixed by using the unicode or whatever - %2B for + for example. While this works, it’s not a good soltution as I need the client to generate the text files and that doesn’t make it very easy. For the XML (for a news-ticker type thing), this doesn’t work at all.

So what is the deal here and how can I fix this? Thanks!