UTF characters not displayed in Fx3: it's normal?

[Lucas Malor]

I see, instead of UTF characters, little rectangles with them hexadecimal number.

Firefox 3 hasn't a default charset for unicode? If yes, where I can download a free one?

[teoli2003]

It uses the systems font. And a unicode is a charset not a font, btw.

There is no font covering the whole unicode, the hex numbers (that replaced the small ? in previous version) give you the code of the missing characters.

You'll have to find a specific font for the missing chars. Which ones are missing?

[F J Walter]

Firefox 3 seems to adopt the HTML specification's suggestion for showing undisplayable (but not necessarily invalid) characters:

1. Adopt a clearly visible, but unobtrusive mechanism to alert the user of missing resources.
2. If missing characters are presented using their numeric representation, use the hexadecimal (not decimal) form since this is the form used in character set standards.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html#h-5.4

My personal opinion is that showing the hex representation to a non-technical end-user isn't a good idea, so I actually disagree with that way of doing things; though it's rare enough that a document will use a character than a browser can't support for it not to annoy me too much.

To answer your question, you can't download a charset for Unicode. HTML has unicode built-in, it's just that Windows, and your existing fonts, can't display all of the tens of thousands of characters.

You would need to know exactly which missing characters you need.

This chart might help you learn how many different characters are in Unicode:
http://jrgraphix.net/research/unicode_b ... hp?block=0

[pal-moz]

maybe similar one, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=382393

[Lucas Malor]

For what I know, unicode fonts exist. See for example this page:

http://www.slovo.info/unifonts.htm

I have not installed one of them already, so I'm not sure.

I think if a free unicode font exists, it could be integrated in Fx installer as well.

What do you think about?

[teoli2003]

No, no, you misunderstood us. We are not saying that there aren't unicode font. We are saying there isn't one single font able to display all unicode characters. Hence, there is always the possibility to go by a site with some unusual characters, coded in Unicode, that none of your font have.

I've got quite a lot of hexa placeholders at the beginning: I took care to install missing fonts (for Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Mayalam, ...). [As a trick I used the different versions of Wikipedia to check the different alphabets, syllabus or ideograms]

Now it is much rarer that I see an hexa placeholder.

[Lucas Malor]

We are saying there isn't one single font able to display all unicode characters.

So the site I found is a link to packs of several fonts?

[teoli2003]

Yes, it seems so.

[Lucas Malor]

But in theory you can create a font that contains all unicode characters, right?

I think a font with all unicode characters, compatible with all OSes, will be a good improvement to end-user experience.

[trolly]

Well, a font with 65535 glyphs will have a few MBs. And that is only UTF-16. Full Unicode has probably several million characters. And which font type? TrueType, Type 1, ...

[Lucas Malor]

Ah! I found!

http://web.archive.org/web/200706150720 ... m/unifont/

[teoli2003]

I'm afraid that's this front is not vectorial, only 8x13.

[Lucas Malor]

Do you intend to squeeze my favorite ideograph into an 8x16 pixel cell? I did not say constant width! If we wanted the character cell to be big enough to also draw any ideograph with more than 4 vertical strokes in it, we would end up with cells at least 14 or 16 pixel wide. Such a huge cell would be way oversized for Latin letters and the usual row of 80 cells would no longer fit in a 640 pixel screen width.

Anyway I don't know if the project is still alive. Original author has left the project. Its new site: http://www.unicodecharacter.com/ tells me it is overloaded.

Anyway, take a look to this:

http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/

[Lucas Malor]

Also this project is very interesting:

http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

This is the related bug in Bugzilla@Mozilla:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408497

[Lucas Malor]

Ah, also this project is interesting:

http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/cu.html

bitmap fonts, but a very larger number of chars.