Why are special characters not displaying in Handbrake?

It’s driving me absolutely nuts. I’ve got a handful of movies with subtitles that need converting, and I usually just breeze through it using Handbrake without any drama. To get the special characters to show up right, I’d always save the subtitle files in Notepad using "Unicode," but now that option seems to have vanished into thin air from my Notepad menu. Instead of the usual characters, I’m just getting a bunch of weird, glitchy symbols everywhere.
Does anyone actually know how to fix this?

Morgan Ortiz6 said:
.......I had to save the subtitle file as "Unicode" in Notepad, but now that Unicode option has completely vanished from my Notepad menu. Instead of seeing normal characters, I'm getting a bunch of weird, garbled symbols everywhere.

How on earth do you think Unicode just disappears from Notepad? 😲 You simply open the file, select "Save As...", and the encoding options—including Unicode—will be right there waiting for you.

I don't personally use the specific software you're talking about, but frankly, that's irrelevant. The subtitle needs to be in Unicode if that solves your issue—which it clearly should—or if that fails, you use ISO. There is no third option here.

If you're insisting that the Unicode option has somehow evaporated, then go find a dedicated text editor designed specifically for handling document encoding.

I don't have Unicode available here, just UTF and ISO, and even when I try to fix it, those specific characters like Č and Ć still show up as gibberish.
I honestly had no idea there was actually a dedicated program or editor out there specifically for encoding documents.
Do you happen to know the name of it? I'd love to go hunt it down and give it a shot.

https://support.smartbear.com/testle...code-apps.html

Set this to English

Noah Miller6 said:
https://support.smartbear.com/testle...code-apps.html

Set everything to American

I’ve already flipped all the settings to American, but it’s still not doing anything.

Then just save it using
Windows-1252 encoding

By the way, if you actually want to deal with subtitles without losing your mind, Aegisub is the superior choice.
https://nikse.dk/SubtitleEdit/
Download it, install it, set your encoding to Windows-1252, export as an .srt, and you're done. Simple enough.