Symptoms

The following appears in the atlassian-confluence.log:

fileSystemEncoding = ANSI_X3.4-1968

Another symptom:

• Workbox Notification shows ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED
• When exporting to PDF, texts that include special characters such as accents do not get printed. For example, instead of printing é and ü, the PDF export will display e and u.

Diagnosis

Run the command su -l -c locale confluence to find the following result:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Cause

The filesystem encoding in Confluence has been set to ANSI_X3.4-1968. This encoding can cause issues in Confluence as the encoding supported in Confluence is only UTF-8 

Resolution

1. In setenv.sh, add the following JVM parameter by editing the line below before the export CATALINA_OPTS parameter:
   

   CATALINA_OPTS="-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Djavax.servlet.request.encoding=UTF8 ${CATALINA_OPTS}"
   export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
   export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8

   
   (If you are running an old Confluence's version, you might need to use the parameter below instead of the CATALINA_OPTS variable:)

   JVM_SUPPORT_RECOMMENDED_ARGS="-Dfile.encoding=utf-8

2. Take the following additional steps if you use Redhat or Ubuntu:

   • In Redhat 6.x (RPM-Based distributions), set the LANG and LC_ALL values in /etc/sysconfig/i18n as follows:

     LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
     LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

   • In Redhat 7.x (RPM-Based distributions), run the following command:
     
     

     sudo localectl set-locale LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

   • In Ubuntu (Debian and Debian-based distributions), set the LANG and LC_ALL values in /etc/default/locale as follows:

     LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
     LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

Related articles:

• Configuring Character Encoding

• Non english characters, umlauts and diaeresis missing or appear as boxes in Confluence Data Center PDF export