How can I save unicode characters in m-files and display them in figures using m-files?

Unicode characters (Hebrew letters, in my case) are not saved in m-files. After saving and re-opening the file I see blocks instead of the unicode characters. Also, when I try to display unicode characters in a figure, I get blocks; however, command line works fine and also displaying unicode characters that were read from a file. I tried to apply the solution given here, but this did not solve the problem and displayed garbage. Any solution?

[Paul McKenzie]

R2020a seems to solve this problem: all m files are stored in UTF-8 format, thereby permitting unicode characters.

[Ron Chen]

Thanks Paul, I will install the latest version and give it a try

[Walter Roberson]

R2020a does not need the lcdata_utf8 trick. It now stores .m files as utf-8 so code can contain them directly.

To display unicode inside a figure, the Interpreter for the text data must be 'none' or 'tex'; you cannot display arbitrary unicode characters when the Interpreter is 'latex'

Answer 1

[Ron Chen]

I managed to resolve this issue by renaming the file MATLABroot\bin\lcdata_utf8.xml to lcdata.xml.

[Andrey Kazak]

The fix does not work on 2018b for Windows.

Please suggest a workaround.

Thank you.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

By default, only the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese versions store source code in utf8 as is needed to store such characters directly in the file. For all other regions, you have to tweak MATLAB in a system dependant manner.

[Ron Chen]

Thank you Walter. Can you be more specific? How should this be done?

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/340903-unicode-characters-in-m-file#answer_274523

[Ron Chen]

This is the same link I included in my original message, which did not work for me...