# Find characters incompatible with document encoding in CotEditor on Mac

If you input a character which is incompatible with your document’s current encoding, it can appear garbled when you save and reopen the file. This function helps to prevent that kind of problem. You can inspect if there are any such problematic characters in your document, before closing it.

Also, this function is useful when you are going to convert between the two encodings whose character repertoires are different from each other, for example, from Japanese (Mac OS) to Japanese (Windows, DOS) or from Unicode to a local encoding.

To show incompatible characters:

1. Choose View > Inspector > Warnings.
2. To close the list, drag the view separator to the window edge, or choose View > Inspector > Hide Inspector.