Character encoding character-encoding

Image Rendering supports material catalogs with ISO‑8859‑1 and UTF‑8 encoding.

A byte order mark (BOM) is used to specify the encoding for each file. For UTF-8, the BOM is the byte sequence EF BB BF. UTF-8 encoding is assumed when this character sequence is detected at the very beginning of each material catalog file. Any other byte sequence result in the file being interpreted as being encoded to the ISO-8859-1 standard.

Many contemporary applications, when configured for UTF-8, insert the BOM automatically.