^CI — Character Encoding
Plain English
Selects how the printer interprets the bytes inside subsequent `^FD` fields. Without `^CI`, non-ASCII characters render as garbled bytes whose appearance depends on the printer's default code page. `^CI28` (UTF-8) is the right choice for almost all modern multilingual labels.
When to use
Whenever the label contains anything outside basic ASCII — accents (é, ü, ñ), currency symbols (€, £), Cyrillic, CJK. Place `^CI` once per label, before any non-ASCII `^FD`. Mismatching `^CI` and the actual byte encoding produces silently wrong glyphs.
Syntax
^CIn
Parameters
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
n | Encoding ID. Common values: 0 (USA-1), 7 (USA-2), 13 (Latin-1 / ISO 8859-1, Western European), 17 (Asian), 27 (UTF-8 alias), 28 (Unicode UTF-8 — recommended), 29 (UTF-16 BE), 30 (UTF-16 LE), 31 (UTF-32). 0–14 are pre-Unicode legacy code pages. |
Example
^XA ^CI28 ^FO50,50^A0N,30,30^FDCafé résumé naïve^FS ^XZ
`^CI28` enables UTF-8 so accented Latin characters render correctly. Drop the `^CI28` line and the printer falls back to its default code page — likely producing the wrong glyphs.