If you use a langauge other than English as your primary langauge in Mac OS X, you may encounter seeing garbage text in Flash embeded in browsers like Safari and Firefox.
This may seem to be caused by a hidden file called .CFUserTextEncoding located in your home directory. Because the file name starts with a .(dot), this can’t be seen in the Finder. You need to open the file and change the content from 0:0 to 1:14.
If you are not comfortable with using Terminal, run the following code in Terminal.
echo 1:14 >~/.CFUserTextEncoding
Enter the code above and press return.
You may need to re-login or restart your Mac to see the effect. This solution may be effective for other apps like OpenOffice.org.