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A question mark where a letter should be usually means one of two things: the text was decoded or saved with an incompatible character encoding, or the app or font could not display that character. The mark on screen cannot tell you which one happened, so the first job is to find out whether the original text is still intact.
The three causes behind the symptom
Question marks in place of letters come from three different mechanisms. They can look identical on screen, but they call for different fixes, and one of them can permanently destroy data.
1. Wrong encoding or incorrect encoding metadata
A file, web page or email is stored as a sequence of bytes. A character encoding is the rule that says which bytes stand for which characters. If the sender saved the bytes in one encoding and the receiver reads them as another, non-ASCII characters such as accented letters turn into garbled sequences, question marks or replacement characters. The Unicode Consortium’s article Display Problems? identifies mislabelled legacy-encoded text as a common cause of garbled characters and recommends a Unicode encoding such as UTF-8 as current best practice.
2. Lossy replacement during saving or conversion
Some encodings cannot represent every character. When you save text into such an encoding, the character may be replaced rather than preserved. Microsoft’s support article Choose text encoding when you open and save files states: “If the encoding that you chose has no equivalent character for a character marked in red, the character marked in red will be saved as an out-of-context character, such as a question mark.”
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This is the dangerous case. The question mark is now stored in the file itself. Changing the font or the encoding setting afterwards will not bring the original letter back.
3. Missing font glyph or incomplete font fallback
Here the text is correct, but the font in use has no shape (glyph) for that character, and the application has no fallback font that does. Depending on the app, the result may be a box, a box containing a question mark, another fallback symbol, or blank space. Unicode notes that encoding determines which character the bytes represent, while fonts only supply the shapes, so a missing glyph can occur even when the underlying character is correct. The W3C Internationalization article Character encodings for beginners makes the same separation.
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How to tell which cause you have
The pattern of the symptom is a clue, not a proof. Use the table below to form a first hypothesis, then confirm it with the checks in the next section.
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| What you see | Most likely cause | First check |
|---|---|---|
| Many accented letters or symbols became question marks in one app | Encoding setting in that app, or lossy save | Open a copy of the file and look at the stored text in a second app |
| Garbled sequences across a whole page or file | Decoding mismatch (declared encoding differs from actual bytes) | Compare the declared encoding with how the file was saved |
| Isolated boxes or fallback symbols for specific characters | Missing glyph in the font | Switch to a font with broader coverage and see if the characters appear |
| The same text displays correctly in another app | Font selection or fallback in the first app | Check the font and fallback settings in the original app |
| The text is wrong in the stored file, not just on screen | Lossy conversion or wrong decoding that was saved | Recover an intact copy before resaving |
Unicode and W3C documentation also describes a related symbol: the replacement character U+FFFD (�), which many tools show when they encounter bytes that are not valid for the encoding they are reading. A � is therefore a sign of invalid byte data, not of a font problem.
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A safe diagnostic sequence
- Preserve the original. Copy the file, or the message or page source, before you try to reopen and resave it with a different encoding. If the file has already been saved with literal question marks, a copy of that version will not contain the lost characters either, so look for an older backup, the sender’s original, or the source system.
- Look at the form of the symptom. Use the table above. Widespread wrong characters point to decoding or metadata. Isolated boxes point to glyph coverage.
- Compare contexts. Open the same text in a second application, or change the font in the first. If it displays correctly elsewhere, the problem is in the original app’s font handling. If it is wrong everywhere, the stored data or the encoding path is the problem.
- Check the stored text. Open the file in an editor that shows raw characters and confirm whether the accented letters are present. If they are, the issue is display. If they are question marks in the file, it is a lossy save.
- Apply the fix that matches the cause (see the next section).
Fixing each cause
Fixing a decoding mismatch in text files
When you open a suspicious text file in Word, enable the prompt that confirms file format conversion, then choose an encoding under which the preview reads correctly. Microsoft describes this as the way to pick the decoding when the file is opened. Keep in mind that choosing a different encoding only changes how the bytes are read; it does not rewrite them.
For new Unicode text, the Unicode Consortium calls UTF-8 the preferred form, and W3C recommends it for web content and data. Use UTF-8 when both the format and the receiving system support it. Because UTF-8 is not always the default in older tools, check the setting at each boundary where the file leaves your hands.
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Fixing web pages with a mismatched declaration
For a web page, the character encoding declared in the HTTP Content-Type header (for example charset=utf-8) and in the HTML document must match the bytes the file actually contains. W3C’s article Upgrading from language-specific legacy encoding to Unicode encoding is explicit on this point: changing the declaration does not convert the bytes. You also need to save the file in the declared encoding, so that the declaration and the content agree.
Preventing lossy saves in Word
When saving, choose an encoding that can represent every character in the document. If the document uses a mix of scripts or symbols, Unicode-based encodings such as UTF-8 avoid substitution, while legacy single-byte encodings may not. Microsoft’s guidance on saving text is the reference for the encoding options available in your version.
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Fixing missing glyphs
If the stored text is correct and only some characters show as boxes, change the font to one with coverage for those characters. Unicode suggests choosing a font that supports the characters in question. On web pages, where you cannot rely on the reader’s installed fonts, the Unicode guidance points toward CSS web fonts so that the glyphs are delivered with the page.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.A current Outlook example
Microsoft’s support article Classic Outlook replaces accented and extended characters with question marks describes a known issue in Outlook for Microsoft 365, where accented letters, the pound sign and registered trademark symbols may display as question marks. The article was last updated March 6, 2026. The workarounds it lists are turning off automatic encoding selection for outgoing messages and selecting UTF-8 for outbound encoding.
This is an issue documented for one product. If your question marks appear in several applications, the cause is more likely one of the three general causes above, and the Outlook workaround will not address it.
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Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Practical checklist
- Keep an untouched copy of the file, message or page before changing any encoding.
- Check whether the stored text contains the correct characters, or literal question marks.
- Match the declared encoding to the saved bytes on web content and in text files.
- Use UTF-8 for new Unicode text where the receiving system supports it.
- If only boxes appear, switch to a font with coverage for those characters.
- If the symptom is limited to one application, check that vendor’s current support guidance.
Once you know whether the character is still in the file, the fix is usually straightforward. Lost characters, however, can only be restored from an intact copy.
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