Question: My laptop suffered a hard drive failure and i had to re-install IntelliJ and windows on a new hard drive.
In my old drive i was able to print (system.out.println) foreign languages in the console without any issues, but after the re-installation my console is not recognizing the text and i get an output like this 

```
????????????? ???? |
??????????-??? ??_???????-???

?????? ???????:
?????: ?????????-?????
????????? ??-?? ? 1-1 ?

```

i dont think its due to any error in my source, is there any way to configure my IDE to be able to recognize this text ( tamil in this instance but i need to support a large number of languages )

Thanks in advance,
Sumal.

Answer: 
The proposed solution wasn't working for me. Even though I've set the IDE encoding & Project encoding to UTF-8 in Idea's Settings, the console continued to not display properly the characters. So for other people in the same situation I'm going to post another solution which worked for me.

You need to find the idea executable file. On Windows it's probably under "C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA 14.1.5\bin". In the file "idea.exe.vmoptions" you need to add the following line: 

```
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

```
In `Help` / `Edit Custom VM Options...` add:

```
-Dconsole.encoding=UTF-8
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

```

...and restart IDE :)

---

You can also edit file manualy from:

* `C:\Program Files\JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA\bin\idea64.exe.vmoptions`

or

* `C:\Users\[YOUR_USER_NAME]\AppData\Roaming\JetBrains\IntelliJIdea2021.2\idea64.exe.vmoptions`

depending on what config file uses your IDE.

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> 
> If you are using x86 version the file is named accordingly
> 
> 
>