Odd character replacements in Firefox
Bill Cable
the correct search terms... but anyway...
In Firefox 3, I've noticed a new scheme for replacing non-standard
characters. They convert to a 2x2 grid of digits in a little box
like:
____
|49|
|94|
I've found it on occasion to be replacing characters like curved
apostrophes and curved quote marks, making some content difficult to
read. Is there any way to fix this?
I'll try copying and pasting one of the replacement characters here,
though I don't have a clue how it'll show up on the Usenet...
Thanks!
--
Bill Cable - Steelers Fan & Star Wars Collector
http://CreatureCantina.com <----- funny!
ca...@creaturecantina.com
Tony Mechelynck
> There's probably a simple explanation for this and I'm just not using
> the correct search terms... but anyway...
>
> In Firefox 3, I've noticed a new scheme for replacing non-standard
> characters. They convert to a 2x2 grid of digits in a little box
> like:
>
> ____
> |49|
> |94|
>
> I've found it on occasion to be replacing characters like curved
> apostrophes and curved quote marks, making some content difficult to
> read. Is there any way to fix this?
>
> I'll try copying and pasting one of the replacement characters here,
> though I don't have a clue how it'll show up on the Usenet...
>
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
It's a font.
When Firefox doesn't find a glyph for some character in your chosen
font, it looks for another font which has a glyph for it. One of the
fonts (usually tried last) has a glyph for every codepoint, showing the
hex value of the Unicode codepoint using either four hex digits (for
codepoints in the BMP, U+0000 to U+FFFF) or six (for codepoints outside
the BMP, U+10000 to U+10FFFF).
The example you show is for 䦔 aka U+4994, a Chinese character meaning
"door latch". I'm drawing it here approximately in ASCII art since
apparently you don't have a glyph for it:
__ __
|__| |__|
|__| |__|
| ___ |
| |___| |
| |___| |
| _______ |
| |
To display the above, a fixed-width font is of course best.
The way to fix it is to install an appropriate font, for this character
a Traditional-Chinese font; for "weird" quotes you might try to chose a
different Latin font in (Tools => Options or Edit => Preferences or
Firefox => Preferences) => Content => Fonts & Colors, and perhaps also
click the "Advanced" button there.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Why is it that there are so many more horses' asses than there are
horses?
-- G. Gordon Liddy
Mumia Wotse
> There's probably a simple explanation for this and I'm just not using
> the correct search terms... but anyway...
>
> In Firefox 3, I've noticed a new scheme for replacing non-standard
> characters. They convert to a 2x2 grid of digits in a little box
> like:
>
> ____
> |49|
> |94|
>
> I've found it on occasion to be replacing characters like curved
> apostrophes and curved quote marks, making some content difficult to
> read. Is there any way to fix this?
Yes, install the fonts that contain those characters. The little box you
showed us above represents the Unicode character \x4994 (䦔). Since
neither of us have installed any fonts that display that character, we
both see the little box showing the character's hex codes.
Fonts that clam to be ISO-10646 encoded are Unicode-enabled; however,
finding the right font to display "䦔" might be tricky; Unicode consists
of at least 65,000 characters, but any particular font will only contain
a couple hundred.
--
Ron K.
Usually a CJK glyph populated font will be a file over 10 MB in size.
My Compaq Vista box has three or for such fonts.
--
Ron K.
Who is General Failure, and why is he searching my HDD?
Kernel Restore reported Major Error used BSOD to msg the enemy!
Tony Mechelynck
On Windows, a good Traditional-Chinese font is MingLiU. On Linux, I
haven't got that font, but I have several other East-Asian fonts whose
names start with FZ
Best regards,
Tony.
--
hundred-and-one symptoms of being an internet addict:
75. You start wondering whether you could actually upgrade your brain
with a Pentium Pro microprocessor 80. The upgrade works just fine.
