Some of our users have reported that they see strange characters like "Ã¥ fÃ¥" when they preview their webpages. These characters do not appear in the source code. This can happen if you are not using the Universal Alphabet (UTF-8) character set. This character set supports a wide array of special characters in several languages, and is usually the best choice for most web designers.

To set your character set to UTF-8, go to Document > Document Properties, select Universal Alphabet (UTF-8) from the Charset drop-down list, and then click OK. This should automatically change the charset attribute value to UTF-8; however, it never hurts to check. Go to the <head> section of your document and check out the first meta element. Depending on your DOCTYPE, it should look like this:

HTML 4.0

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

XHTML 1.0

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

HTML5

<meta charset="utf-8">