strange characters display instead of letters

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Gemini1096
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by Gemini1096 »

Now this will sound strange but I had written a lengthy rant about this problem which affected me too (and I have a Japanese XP, with all CJK stuff on it and being French I'm reading a lot of French sites).
I had noticed that this affected only English sites (including wikipedia in english) using diacritic letters (as in résumé), even though my encoding was on auto-detect universal/unicode, I had these annoying little squares, which, if you are reading an article about France in English will show up very often and renders it illegible.
But on French websites I had no problems EXCEPT when reading some New agency briefs, which I suspect are fed to the newspapers websites directly from the news agencies and so probably their headers and other technical data are different from the rest of the site. I was always on Autodetect (universal) and Unicode settings. I reset these things but since I had already these settings I was doubtful it would work.
Anyway, I tried to find examples of my problems to check and probably post them here for a public rant :-) In the meantime, the problem disappeared... WTF???
The only thing I have done, the only setting I changed at any given point, beside ensuring I had auto-detect universal/ unicode as encoding: I switched the language of my keyboard from Jp (which is Qwerty plus an IME) to Fr in order to type "Pelé" in the search engine of the NYTimes... (I was expecting to get examples of these little squares in the results)
The first time I wrote Pelé all results returned included "Pel" though I am 100% positive I did write "Pelé" and it DID show in the search box. This means that somehow, the last letter wasn't sent in the postscript data. I redid the exact same search 3 seconds later and this time it returned the proper results with "Pelé". No annoying little boxes anymore. Nowhere.
I've been browsing all the problematic sites cited in this thread, and more and no problem anymore...

So if you desperate to find a solution, try this one though I can't guarantee anything: in XP, click your language bar and select French. Then go to any search engines. Type diacritic letters (2, 7 or 9 on a qwerty keyboard, see http://www.computerhope.com/help/azerty.gif for a French keyboard layout. The numbers use shift while the accentuated letter use the number key wihtout shift). Repeat just in case...

It looks like my grandma' medecine but I did that and it solved the problem for me... :-/
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trolly
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by trolly »

Sounds to me like a problem in the font cache. Once the font cache is updated to include these characters the characters shows up.
But i can be totally wrong.
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Gingerbread Man
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by Gingerbread Man »

Yumble_OUT wrote:I never had such a exoctic font as Arial Unicode MS installed while I used FF2, and then all pages showed perfectly fine.

You can put that theory to the test with Firefox Portable. It installs separately (either on a USB stick or somewhere on your hard drive) and it doesn't affect your current Firefox profile nor is it affected by it. Firefox Portable 2.0.0.15 is available as are older versions.
trolly wrote:Sounds to me like a problem in the font cache.

To clear the font cache on Windows 2000/XP/Vista,
  1. Exit all applications except Windows Explorer.
  2. Delete C:\WINDOWS\system32\FNTCACHE.DAT
  3. Restart Windows by clicking the Start button, then Turn Off Computer, then Restart.
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avoidz
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by avoidz »

sandeep108 wrote:IMO I think most of the problems stem from the setting View>Character Encoding>Auto Detect>Off, which seems the default. Once this is set to Universal, the ellipses and accents seem to display correctly and the square boxes disappear (other than for other languages - for which one has to enable international language support in the OS).


Thanks, that worked for me, on most (but not all) pages.

Needs fixing for the next version.
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Gingerbread Man
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by Gingerbread Man »

It sounds like you're describing a situation in which the site is instructing the browser to use an incorrect encoding. Only the webmaster can fix those problems.
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avoidz
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by avoidz »

Yes, but this problem only started appearing when I upgraded to Firefox 3, as it has with many others reporting the same issue.
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Gingerbread Man
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by Gingerbread Man »

The browser will use the encoding it's instructed to use, regardless of the brand or version, as I've proved again and again. You can verify for yourself with Firefox Portable Edition.

Personally, I believe expecting Firefox to display characters that the OS can't display, or expecting it to display a page correctly when the site instructs it to display it incorrectly, are both very far-fetched requests. Regardless, as I've said before, anyone who believes they're dealing with a bug should head over to Bugzilla, search to see if the problem has been reported and if it hasn't, file a new bug report. Feedback about Mozilla products can be sent through Hendrix. Posting here to say things like "This should be fixed" accomplishes nothing, since the developers don't read these boards.
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avoidz
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by avoidz »

And the answer is?

I loaded up a portable Firefox (2.0.0.13) and it doesn't have a problem. Neither does 3.0 -- today. Why does the display problem occur like this? That's all I'd like to know.

:)
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Gingerbread Man
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by Gingerbread Man »

avoidz wrote:Why does the display problem occur like this? That's all I'd like to know.

The explanation is at steps 2, 3 and 4 in the troubleshooting post. If you'd like an explanation for a specific site, post a screenshot and the link. As for why a site that didn't work correctly before would work without problems now: either the site or your settings changed, or your font cache was updated.
VanillaMozilla
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by VanillaMozilla »

See also Tool > Options > Content > Languages.

If the Web site doesn't tell you the right encoding, well, the browser has to guess which character set to use. I use ISO-8859-1, but with eastern languages I have no idea how it works.

Tony Soprano wrote:How did you see the muffin-part i posted above? (accidently as Guest)

♡ℓa MuFF!N☮♡ツ


The string "ℓa MuFF!N" does not occur on that Web page. I didn't see any problem with any of the Web pages posted, so I think it's something to do with your setups.

I have some European languages installed but not Armenian or anything like that, and as far as I can tell I'm seeing the pages correctly, including the "resume"s. Some of the people on the MySpace page have creative ways of spelling, but no evidence of missing or misinterpreted characters that I could see. I think you need to check your setup -- either the computer or the character set in Firefox.

As for why Fx 2 displayed a page but Fx 3 does not, it's quite possible that something else changed. (Web site changed, settings on your computer changed, selected different font, Windows update, monkey fingers on the keys, etc.) I don't even see evidence of a problem.
CrackTipe
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by CrackTipe »

My problem is #4 (the rectangles with the letters/numbers). You're telling me that the best thing to do is go an download font programs to fix a problem that was non-existent in FF2?
VanillaMozilla
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by VanillaMozilla »

CrackTipe,
I have no idea what Web site you are looking at or how your computer is configured, since you have supplied no details. I can tell you I did not see any problem where others were reporting problems. If you can prove that there is no change in the Web site, and the ONLY change was an update from version 2 to 3, then you might be able to claim that the difference is the browser. But you have not supplied any information to make that claim.

If you post a link to a Web site, then someone might be able to help you. Without that, there's not much anyone can do.
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avoidz
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by avoidz »

I shouldn't have to troubleshoot this at all. Firefox 2 didn't have this problem. There's nothing wrong with my fonts. And creating a new profile does nothing. I wouldn't be surprised to see this issue gone in the next version...
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VanillaMozilla
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by VanillaMozilla »

That's possible, but you said you got different results on different days. Are you certain that there has been NO change in the Web site? And are you certain it served you the exactly same code each time?

Since it's working now with the same browser, it sounds to me like somebody fixed the Web site.
phio
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Re: strange characters display instead of letters

Post by phio »

I deal with foreign language sites every day and it is clear that the upgrade from FF2 to FF3 has many language problems. The little boxes are displaying all over the place in most of the 35 or so languages that I work with.
In some cases they characters just show up as a blank space, and in other cases the box with the little codes inside.
Nothing on my computer was changed, and FF3 shows webpages as looking rediculous. The bug must be fixed immediately. I literally have seen thousands of these bugs on thousands of websites, during the last month. It's a REAL problem, especially since over a million people in Japan have downloaded the FF3 software. And over a billion in the rest of the world.
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