I have used Pegasus for many years and am now on 4.63. Once a year I make use of the mail merge facility to send Christmas cards to our clients. I went to a lot of trouble to keep the graphic small so as not to irritate anyone and feedback has been very positive.

We also personalise them with a brief message, stored with the address and name in the merge data file. In past years the messages have all bee in English, but this year a colleague thought it would be extra friendly to provide Chinese and Korean script.

I know I can send Chinese script successfully, I have chosen to use UTF-8 as the default for all my mail.

I also know that the data file successfully contains the Chinese characters, encoded UTF-8.

Sadly the merge fails, the Chinese script is garbled. So I suspect that the code which reads the merge data file assumes ANSI and cannot cope with anything else. I cannot find any guidance on the subject in the help file.

Two questions:

Is it possible to use a non-ANSI data file, i.e. is further experimentation futile ?
What encoding will work, or how do I flag the presence of wide character data to the process which reads the merge data?

I guess an answer would require someone to know the OS command used to read strings in from the data file. To keep the answer short and not too onerous, just knowing the function used might allow me to figure it out.

Many thanks to anyone who can throw light on it.