Why does Joomla alter article page rendering of white space

Question

I have recently migrated my website using Akeeba Kickstart, additionally I have installed a new responsive template which I created with Artisteer 4

The trouble is empty paragraphs

<p> </p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

are shown on the pages as

How can I fix this and why does this happen only in the site restored using Akeeba Kickstart; a freshly installed site does not suffer the same whitespace rendering.

Answer 1

The most common cause of this that I've encountered is when people have restored a site from a MySQL database that has utf8_general_ci as it default collation to a MySQL server that has it's default set to latin1_swedish_ci .

In fact a quick search of the Akeeba website found this article on the subject of database collation and UTF-8.