Using desktop applications is still a nightmare, where opening any document from the internet or navigating to a foreign page is hit or miss.
Also, the main frustration is not that it happens often; it's that when you encounter it, fixing it may involve studying the whole software stack to find out where the setting is switched or at what point in the toolchain the format was mishandled.
What kinds of documents are these? Because while sometimes I don't have the right fonts installed, never in my life have I seen a foreign web page fail to decode. The only mojibake I've seen is text that was corrupted during posting, not even showing up right to the author. Documents that people make have always worked as intended.
It depends... I've seen pages in Spanish where common specific Spanish characters are shown mangled. It tends to happen on websites with older platforms, but still...
It also often happens with pages in Chinese or Japanese. But then you bring another problem: when a document is shown as a list full of ▯▯▯▯▯▯,▯▯-.▯▯▯, there's no way to tell if the problem is with the encoding or the fonts, and no obvious way to know which font should be installed and what part of the software stack is the one responsible.
The whole field of displaying documents to end users could benefit from some user-centered design to build tools that helped users to fix these situations, based on some common heuristics to solve the most frequent problems.
And there are non-zero chances that changing to the wrong option and saving the document will permanently break the file as the combination of two wrongly configured codesets.
I don't know, maybe it's me who's doing something wrong and turn to using only a small subset of software tools, properly configured?
But I do need to process documents from many origins using a variety of different tools; I've never found a good programable multimedia editor that satisfies all my needs (something like emacs but with WYSIWIG capabilities).
Using desktop applications is still a nightmare, where opening any document from the internet or navigating to a foreign page is hit or miss.
Also, the main frustration is not that it happens often; it's that when you encounter it, fixing it may involve studying the whole software stack to find out where the setting is switched or at what point in the toolchain the format was mishandled.