SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

TFB · 2011-01-23 19:04:52

I'm using Firefox 4.0b9 (although I don't think this is the issue) and I have trouble seeing some characters. Most often it's on my bank's website. They show up as black diamonds with question marks in it. The other issue I have is sometimes I get problems with glyphs (don't know what to call them). It's basically a black outline square that looks like this:
____
|0 0|
|7 F|

Does my ASCII art impress you?

Anyway, I have my rc.conf look like this:

LOCALE="en_US.UTF-8"
HARDWARECLOCK="UTC"
TIMEZONE="America/New_York"
KEYMAP="us"
CONSOLEFONT=
CONSOLEMAP=
USECOLOR="yes"

Not sure what's causing this issue. Do I need to install more fonts? Which ones?

Last edited by TFB (2011-01-23 20:34:41)

litemotiv · 2011-01-23 19:08:56

Do you have DejaVu installed? That should be used as a sans-serif fallback in Firefox and supports many UTF-8 characters.

karol · 2011-01-23 19:09:39

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode … /index.htm ?

TFB · 2011-01-23 19:36:34

I do have dejavu installed.

karol · 2011-01-23 19:39:15

Can you post links to some websites? Are those websites rendering OK in firefox 3.6?
What firefox settings do you have: do you allow webpages to choose their fonts or do you force your selection?

EDIT: I can't get firefox (both 3.6 and 4) to render it ('') right with my fonts, so I guess it's not your fault. Can somebody versed in webdevelopment tell me why would anyone use that character? Is it a kind of spacer?

EDIT2: Chromium gets it right.

Last edited by karol (2011-01-23 19:50:59)

TFB · 2011-01-23 20:08:18

Yes, it's a firefox bug it seems. Chromium does get it right and I don't have FF 3.6.13 installed now. In 4.0, I do have it set so sites can use their own fonts.

Unfortunately, I have only noticed it on my bank's website (viewing account info) and no, I'm not linking that here. lol

DKnight · 2011-01-23 20:10:32

Have you tried selecting different encodings from "View->Character Encoding" inside Firefox? maybe try autodetection?

karol · 2011-01-23 20:14:00

DKnight wrote:

Have you tried selecting different encodings from "View->Character Encoding" inside Firefox? maybe try autodetection?

It doesn't seem to help here.
Chromium renders it right with the default settings. Using (seemingly) the same settings in firefox doesn't work.

I don't think it's a big deal though.

If anybody wants to give it a shot, save this:

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' />
<title>Title</title>
</head>
<body>
Can you see me: &#x7f; ?
</body>
</html>

as something.html and open it in firefox. It should render as

Can you see me:   ?

not

Can you see me:  ?

Last edited by karol (2011-01-23 20:16:32)

DKnight · 2011-01-23 20:30:09

karol, testing that file with firefox gives me the |00/7F|, but testing it with Chromium I get a blank space. It must be a character that is missing from my fontpacks. Maybe in your system Chromium is picking a different font than Firefox, a font that has that weird |DEL| char.
But what kind of bank would use that in a page anyway? black diamonds with ? as described in the first post, I usually get that when the char encoding setting in firefox mismatchs the page's. It would be interesting if OP could provide a page with that problem, don't you have anything that's not inside your bank account session?

Last edited by DKnight (2011-01-23 20:32:21)

TFB · 2011-01-23 20:34:24

DKnight wrote:

Have you tried selecting different encodings from "View->Character Encoding" inside Firefox? maybe try autodetection?

Yes! This works! I set it to Western ISO-8859-1 and my bank data does show up correctly. I'm not sure why it didn't auto-detect though.

TFB · 2011-01-23 21:50:54

Alright, this looks like the best I can do. When I get to one of those sites, I just need to change the setting. Kind of a pain but meh.

Thanks for all the help!

litemotiv · 2011-01-23 21:53:44

TFB wrote:

Alright, this looks like the best I can do. When I get to one of those sites, I just need to change the setting. Kind of a pain but meh.
Thanks for all the help!

You could email the maintainers of those sites and ask them to change their encoding to utf-8.

TFB · 2011-01-23 23:57:22

litemotiv wrote:

TFB wrote:
Alright, this looks like the best I can do. When I get to one of those sites, I just need to change the setting. Kind of a pain but meh.
Thanks for all the help!
You could email the maintainers of those sites and ask them to change their encoding to utf-8.

LOL. I just emailed my bank letting them know that UTF-8 is superior to iso-8859-1. I'm not going to hold my breath.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-01-23 19:04:52

SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#2 2011-01-23 19:08:56

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#3 2011-01-23 19:09:39

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#4 2011-01-23 19:36:34

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#5 2011-01-23 19:39:15

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#6 2011-01-23 20:08:18

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#7 2011-01-23 20:10:32

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#8 2011-01-23 20:14:00

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#9 2011-01-23 20:30:09

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#10 2011-01-23 20:34:24

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#11 2011-01-23 21:50:54

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#12 2011-01-23 21:53:44

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

#13 2011-01-23 23:57:22

Re: SOLVED: Cannot see certain characters

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