Arch Linux

Schala

Member

Registered: 2012-02-14

Posts: 72

Website

Special characters in text represented as squares in some applications

Some webpages I go to seem to have blank square characters in the text where there should be a special character. Curious, I went ahead and opened a binary file in my text editor, KWrite. I expected to see special characters making up most of the garbage text, but instead I got blank squares in their place, along with ASCII characters.

The special text characters I'm talking about are most of the time not even Unicode ones. These are characters that can be typed when, on Windows, you'd hold down ALT and punch in a four digit number, or if on Mac, hold down the ALT key and type a character (ie. the trademark symbol, euro currency symbol, cent symbol, etc)

There's likely something in the wiki about solving this problem, but I haven't found any answers. On a hunch, I did install the ttf-arphic-uming and ttf-dejavu packages which managed to partially resolve the problem, so I'm guessing this is a font problem, or lack of a font set, rather. Other than those 2 additional font packages, I've only got the font packages gsfonts, ttf-bitstream-vera, and xorg-fonts-{alias,encodings,misc} installed.

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Hardware: Gigabyte X570 AORUS Pro, AMD Ryzen 5900X, Nvidia GTX 1080, 32 GB DDR4 RAM
Choice software: Arch Linux 64-bit with KDE desktop / Windows 11 Home 64-bit

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,360

Re: Special characters in text represented as squares in some applications

Install windows fonts?

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