Why are special characters converted into strange text?

We've received some cases where special characters in commit messages show up as garbled text in Beanstalk. For instance, an umläut would display as something resembling chinese. Or the French words présentation différente show up as strange blocks.

The solution to this problem can be found in the locale used in your operating system. Subversion will obey the settings from your locale OS in order to encode these characters. To resolve this problem, we referenced the Subversion book:

On Windows, locale configuration is done via the “Regional and Language Options” control panel item. There you can view and select the values of individual settings from the available locales, and even customize (at a sickening level of detail) several of the display formatting conventions.

To read the full details, please refer to the chapter on localization in the Subversion book.