Check characters and TXT encoding

Start with the character support boundary

This version uses the PDF standard fonts Helvetica, Times Roman and Courier. Their supported character set works for English and many common Western European accented letters and punctuation. It is a bounded font set, not full Unicode coverage.

Examples such as café, résumé, naïve, £ and € can be used. Common curly quotes and an em dash are supported too. Not every character that looks Latin is included: some extended letters, combining marks and mathematical symbols fall outside this font set.

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, most other non-Latin scripts, emoji and right-to-left layout are outside the current version. The tool checks the actual characters rather than assuming that a whole language is supported.

An unsupported character stops the export

The converter does not replace an unsupported character with a blank or silently delete it. It stops and shows up to five examples, including their Unicode code point and line and column in the normalized text. You can use those examples to locate the issue.

A character shown as é may be a single precomposed letter or a letter e followed by a combining accent. These can look identical in the editor while having different character sequences. This version checks the sequence it receives and does not normalize it automatically.

Do not remove meaningful characters merely to make the error disappear. If your document needs the original script, emoji or specialized notation, use a converter that supports those fonts and layout rules.

Try this sample

Supported sample:
Café · résumé · naïve
Price: £12 or €14
“Check the punctuation” — then preview.

Encoding describes the file, fonts describe the output

UTF-8 is a text file encoding. It can represent characters far beyond the fonts used here. Saving a file as UTF-8 helps the browser read its text correctly; it does not add Chinese or emoji fonts to the PDF generator.

The upload reader accepts valid UTF-8 and UTF-16 with an appropriate byte-order mark. Invalid byte sequences, binary data and embedded NUL characters are rejected. A UTF-16 file without its byte-order mark may not be recognized; resave it as UTF-8 in a text editor.

If a file upload fails, the existing text remains in the editor. The failure is not a reason to replace your original file. Work on a copy and verify the content after changing an encoding.

Use a quick, safe check

Before converting a long file, paste a representative paragraph that includes names, accents, punctuation and any unusual symbols. Create a preview and inspect the actual PDF. Testing only an English heading will not reveal an unsupported character deep inside the document.

1. Try a short representative sample, including the least ordinary characters in your text.
2. If the sample fails, read the line, column and code-point examples in the error.
3. For an encoding error, reopen a copy of the TXT file and save it as UTF-8.
4. For unsupported characters or right-to-left text, choose a tool with the required script support.
5. Keep the complete source text and check the final PDF before sharing.

Sources and related checks

The settings, supported characters and size limits above describe this converter. For the underlying technical behavior, see:

• pdf-lib: standard fonts and font embedding

• How to convert a TXT file to PDF
• Check that your PDF text is searchable

Try it in the converter