gvSIG-Desktop 1.10. User Manual
It is possible to set the character encoding of a table by selecting Table > Set encoding to .dbf files from the menu bar. Choose the table for which the encoding needs to be set and then select the encoding type (charset). This encoding setting is recorded permanently in the table.
Now the table can be added to the gvSIG project. When gvSIG opens the table the character encoding is read and the characters in the table are correctly displayed.
Note: The correct display of characters depends not only on the encoding setting, but also on the virtual machine that is installed (specifically Java 1.6, which supports more encodings than Java 1.5).