# Incorrect display of non-English characters

**URL:** <https://discourse.processing.org/t/incorrect-display-of-non-english-characters/46488>\
**Category:** Processing for Android\
**Created:** [May 30, 2025, 3:05pm UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/incorrect-display-of-non-english-characters/46488 "2025-05-30T15:05:26Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![defaultUser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e19b73/32.png) [@defaultUser](https://discourse.processing.org/u/defaultUser)\
**Post date:** [May 30, 2025, 3:05pm UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/incorrect-display-of-non-english-characters/46488/1 "2025-05-30T15:05:26Z")

</div>

Hello everyone! I am making an app in Android mode. And I have a problem with displaying non-English characters.  
I create a String variable, initialize it with non-English characters (Cyrillic).For example

String myString = “Слава психонавтам”;

And these characters are not displayed correctly (looks like Arabic 🙂 ) on an Android device.  
If I use Java mode, the characters are displayed correctly.  
I tried to implement Cyrillic font from .ttf file.

textFont(createFont(“Roboto-Medium.ttf”, 20, true));

But it doesn’t help.  
I suspect that the problem is in the different encoding between ProcessingIDE in Windows and Android. But I don’t understand how to fix it.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![joshg](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discourse.processing.org/joshg/32/20226_2.png) [@joshg](https://discourse.processing.org/u/joshg)\
**Post date:** [June 1, 2025, 11:20pm UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/incorrect-display-of-non-english-characters/46488/2 "2025-06-01T23:20:43Z")

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This really simple program works on my particular device:

```auto
void setup() {
  
}

void draw() {
  background(0);
  textSize(48);
  text("Слава психонавтам", 100,100);
}

```

Perhaps it’s a device-specific issue where the locale needs to be added somehow?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![defaultUser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e19b73/32.png) [@defaultUser](https://discourse.processing.org/u/defaultUser)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2025, 9:36am UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/incorrect-display-of-non-english-characters/46488/3 "2025-06-02T09:36:56Z")

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I used several different Android devices, all devices have incorrect display of Cyrillic letters.  
I use Processing 4.3.4 on Windows 10. I think the problem is in the encoding on the computer. Because if I write a string with Cyrillic characters to a .TXT file, save the file in UTF-8 encoding and then read it using

```processing
String[] lines = loadStrings("list.txt");
text(lines[0], 10, 10);

```

Everything works fine.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![defaultUser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e19b73/32.png) [@defaultUser](https://discourse.processing.org/u/defaultUser)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2025, 11:22am UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/incorrect-display-of-non-english-characters/46488/4 "2025-06-02T11:22:37Z")

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Problem solved! ))))))  
This thread helped: [Special characters on android mode -- encoding problem](https://discourse.processing.org/t/special-characters-on-android-mode-encoding-problem/1994)  
On my Windows machine, I added a new environment variable JAVA\_TOOL\_OPTIONS and the value -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8. Then I rebooted the computer and everything worked fine.