CS6 displays weird characters

Report · Aug 23, 2023

Hello, I had to reinstall CS6 after a computer crash. Now when I open any page, unformatted text shows up as nonsense characters, like they have been mis-mapped. This happens regardless of how I change page properties. Font in any format other than no format shows up correctly. If I highlight the text and make it bold or italics for example it displays correctly.Even <em></em> is right. I have done nothing with the preferences, everything is default. All my pages were created in CS6 and all displayed properly before I installed it again. Notice that the text in italics on 6. shows properly. I haven't found a page yet that this doesn't happen on.

Report · Aug 24, 2023

I'm guessing here, without seeing more, that you may have a corrupt font file.

Try changing the font you are using in your CSS and see if it displays correctly.

Given the gibberish has a certain look and feel to it, you may benefit from a deep virus scan as well.

Report · Aug 24, 2023

Wll it hsa resolved itself for now. It was picking up a GIS symbols font (which I probably used once 15 years ago) instead of Arial I uninstalled that font and it's back. Don't know why that would be, every piece of software is brand spanking new, I'm poaranoid about losing stuff so I don't change settings on anything if I can help it until I get the software that I need installed and working correctly. And I still lost a contract because I basically had no way to do the work without my GIS which doesn't even function on my laptop. I more or less tore down the computer to the bare motherboard, ditched the C drive and started over. Hopefully DW will behave now 🙂

While I have your attention it's doing something else strange, in some table cells the border has changed to two parallel vertical lines and I can't grab them. It displays just fine in my browser. Also while searching for a post about my issue I ran into a few posts that said to make every page HTML 5 / UTF 8. Is that really necessary, and is there a way I can do it as a batch? I see this in the header of a page I changed <meta charset="utf-8" /> but I don't see a tag for "HTML 5". And one more thing (forgive me if I'm being a pest) I got a notice for a CS6 update that I've never seen before, do you think it's safe to apply it?

Report · Aug 24, 2023

1. Without seeing an image of the interface, I'm not quite sure what the "two parallel vertical lines" thing is all about.

2. In modern code, the HTML 5 doctype is the standard. Your first line of code should be...

<!doctype html>

...on every page. It typically won't make a whole lot of difference, but it has been the standard for the last decade or so. I'm not sure if CS6 knows what the HTML5 Doctype Declaration is.

3. CS6 hasn't been updated since 2012. The update is likely from then and simply hasn't been added to your new installation. If I recall correctly, it had something to do with items that have since been disabled completely in the program.

Report · Aug 24, 2023

What caused you to reinstall CS6? I'm wondering if there are deeper system issues here. I do believe as suggested this is related to a corrupt font, but if this is core system font, you may have other issues at play here. Can you see what font this should be and potentially re-install it, or you may want to consider repairing your OS installation.

Report · Aug 24, 2023

I unnstalled the offending font and it went away, thanks for the advice!

Report · Aug 24, 2023

I notice you're using an ISO Western European character set. For best results on the web, you should use universal (utf-8) characters.

In HTML5 documents, the charset appears on line 5.

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Unique Page Title</title>

<meta charset="utf-8">

Also formatted text that is copied & pasted from other applications like MS Word can create massive problems in HTML code. For this reason, it's recommended that you strip out formatting before pasting. Use Edit > Paste Special > Text Only or Text with Structure. This will eliminate unwanted MS Word formatting from ever reaching your code.

Lastly, CS6 is 10+ years old & no longer supported. You really should upgrade to modern web authoring software. There have been significant changes to the web and the devices we use since 2012. See links below.

================
CODE TUTORIALS
- https://www.w3schools.com/html/
- https://www.w3schools.com/css/
- https://www.w3schools.com/js/

- https://www.w3schools.com/bootstrap/
================
MODERN CODE EDITORS:
-- Adobe Dreamweaver CC - https://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html
-- Codespaces (free, browser-based) - https://github.com/features/codespaces
-- Nova (Mac only, formerly called Coda) - https://nova.app/
-- Pinegrow - https://pinegrow.com/
-- Sublime Text - http://www.sublimetext.com/
-- Visual Studio Code (free) - https://code.visualstudio.com/
-- Wappler ~ Visual Web App Builder - https://wappler.io/

Nancy O'Shea— Product User, Community Expert & Moderator

Adobe Community

CS6 displays weird characters

1 Correct answer