You're right that it's not obvious. And given the fact that every IDE needs a plugin for properties files, I think that this is a strange standard. This comes from Java, not Seam. anonymous wrote : You can't. Java property files are always encoded in ISO-8859-1. In | order to use other characters you need to escape them properly. There | is an encoder/decoder for it and/or eclipse plugin. http://www.google.bg/search?q=properties+eclipse Sorry but I don't use Eclipse and I have not found a good way to handle properties files when I was using it. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4067919#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...