Maya supports characters in the lower ASCII range (0-127) for node and attribute names. On some platforms, Maya allows these names to contain single-byte characters from the extended ASCII range (for example, Windows under the Latin 1 code page 1252, and Linux in a Latin locale such as en_US.iso88591). These extended ASCII characters include letters with accents and other diacritical marks and digraphs (for example, é and ß), commonly found in such languages as French or German. Japanese Hankaku characters are not supported.

Scene files with node or attribute names containing characters outside the lower-ASCII range may exhibit problems when moved between platforms.

In order to properly use these extended ASCII characters on Windows, you must first open the Regional and Language Options Control Panel, and ensure that the Advanced tab's language setting for non-Unicode programs is set to a Latin-compatible language such as English, French, or German. Changing this language setting may require you to reboot your system.

In order to properly save or open scenes with these characters on Linux, you must set your LANG environment variable to a Latin-compatible locale before running Maya. Depending on your shell, the command to do so will look something like this:

export LANG=en_US.iso88591

Maya does not allow extended ASCII characters in node or attribute names on Mac OS X, or on Linux running under a multi-byte locale such as en_US.UTF-8. Opening a scene file with extended ASCII characters in an unsupported environment may result in data loss.

(Maya's user interface on Linux does not support Japanese or any other multi-byte text.)