Print characters with an acute in ZPL

Question

If I send the ZPL commands below to a Zebra printer, it prints AmitiÙ:

^XA
^FO50,20
^CI7
^A0N,25,15
^FD
Amitié
^FS
^XZ

• Note that the file encoding is ANSI.
• Note the use of the ZPL command ^CI7 (7 => Single Byte Encoding - France 1 Character Set).

On the other hand, if I send the ZPL commands below to a Zebra printer, it prints Amitié (which is what I actually need to get):

^XA
^FO50,20
^CI28
^A0N,25,15
^FD
Amitié
^FS
^XZ

• Note that the file encoding is UTF-8.
• Note the use of the ZPL command ^CI28 (28 => Unicode (UTF-8 encoding) - Unicode Character Set).

Do you know what's wrong in the first case?

Thank you for helping.

Answer 1

Use UTF-8 by placing a ^CI28 command at the top of your ZPL template, eg

^XA
^CI28
^CF0,80
^FO70,40^FDavión^FS
^XZ

Answer 2

According to the programing guide document from Zebra ^CI using 7 will get you Code Page 850 with some specific character replacements. When you say you had the file encoded in ANSI, I assume you mean Code Page Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 (latin1).

The character é in Windows-1252 and latin1 is #00E9, but that's Ú in 850; you would want #0082 for é in 850. Using ^CI7 you could apparently also get an é with #007B since that's one of the specific character replacements made with that command.

Using UTF8 (with ^CI28) is probably the way to go since it's widely supported and understood, but note that you could also try ^CI27 (which may work even if you have an older version of the Zebra firmware that doesn't support ^CI28) and that should get you code page 1252. If that doesn't work you'll need to encode your text using code page 850.