Issues with dropbox: "unicode encoding conflict" after saving files with LibreOffice [closed]

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The official account from Dropbox help is:

In some instances, there are several ways to create the same character on your keyboard. Although the characters may look the same, they are not the same to operating systems and Dropbox.

Indeed. Given you mention MacOS it is likely that the characters have been created using a different encoding from UTF-8. It may be that this is a LibreOffice issue, although It sounds to me more like an operating system setting or method of entry problem. A good reference article on encoding can be found here with the part from the "Hello" example onwards essentially demonstrating the same thing I have here (I am using MacOS 10.6.8 Terminal for clarity).

MacOS X encoding example

This is basic example to demonstrate in a simple manner the problem with encoding and why the character é needs to be qualified with an encoding in order to understand how it is represented.

Make sure both UTF-8 and Western (Mac OS Roman) encodings are available i.e., Terminal > Preferences… > Encodings

With the terminal set to UTF-8 (Terminal > Preferences… > Settings > Advanced > International) check the encoding:

... and the locale:

$ locale
LANG="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Now we create a simple text example using the MacOS key combination Option-E+E to produce é (in all instances below). First place some UTF-8 text in a file:

$ echo amélié > utf8.txt
$ cat utf8.txt
amélié
$ file -b utf8.txt 
UTF-8 Unicode text

... now place some ASCII text in a file with a UTF-8 file name:

$ echo abc123 > amélié_ascii.txt
$ cat amélié_ascii.txt
abc123
$ file -b amélié_ascii.txt 
ASCII text

Change terminal encoding from UTF-8 to Western (Mac OS Roman):

We are now placing ANSI text in a file (even though it appears to be UTF-8):

$ echo amélié > ansi.txt
$ cat ansi.txt 
amélié
$ file -b ansi.txt
Non-ISO extended-ASCII text

Check the previous UTF-8 file:

$ cat utf8.txt 
amélié

Create another ASCII file:

$ echo abc123 > amélié_ascii.txt
$ cat am

… at this point I press TAB (twice) to try and autocomplete the filename, which displays:

am%8Eli%8E_ascii.txt  ameÃÅlieÃÅ_ascii.txt

Check both files, starting with the Western encoding ASCII one:

$ cat am%8Eli%8E_ascii.txt 
abc123
$ file -b am%8Eli%8E_ascii.txt 
ASCII text
$ file -b ameÃÅlieÃÅ_ascii.txt 
ASCII text

Change terminal ... (more)