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General Unicode requirement in INF files

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INF files must be saved with Unicode (UTF-16 LE) or ANSI file encoding. Unicode (UTF-16 LE) is preferred since it allows the INF to support localizing the INF Strings section in a wide variety of languages. If your INF contains non-ASCII characters, you must save the file as a Unicode (UTF-16 LE) file.

You can create or modify an INF file by using any text editor in which you can control the insertion of line breaks.

To check for Unicode in INF files using Notepad:

  1. Use Notepad to open the INF file.
  2. On the File menu, select Save As.
  3. If ANSI appears in the Encoding field of the dialog box, change the encoding to UTF-16 LE (Unicode on older versions of Notepad) and save the file under a new name.

The following figure shows the Save As dialog box for a file that has ANSI encoding:

Screenshot of Save As dialog box with ANSI encoding selected.

The proper default value is shown in this figure:

Screenshot of Save As dialog box with UTF-16 LE encoding selected.

On older versions of Notepad, it might look like this figure:

Screenshot of Save As dialog box with Unicode encoding selected on older Notepad versions.