Understanding the basic concepts of character encoding is necessary for creating, manipulating, and rendering any kind of character data. Whenever data is brought into SAS from various external sources; whenever it is transferred between SAS applications running different locales or across the network via thin clients; and when output is written to external files, SAS data sets, printers, or Web pages, an encoding is involved. In each of these cases something can go wrong. It is the user’s responsibility to ensure that the data is stored, processed, and rendered in the correct encoding. Manfred Kiefer"s SAS Encoding: Understanding the Details explains the basic concepts of characters, encodings, glyphs, and fonts and gives practical examples for how to troubleshoot encoding problems. Addressed to the beginner as well as to the advanced SAS user, SAS Encoding: Understanding the Details helps solve readers" encoding problems. It provides background information on encodings, shows how they are used with SAS software, and explains typical problems and ways to sort those out. It also presents examples on how to set up SAS software in an international environment.