Mozilla Software → Re: What is 65533;?

Grail, for simplicity and for test purposes I just picked Segoe Media Center, which was already installed. I didn't restart FF, though. Maybe I should try that...although I still say I never saw that crazy character until recently...and now it's popping up quite often!

I played around with different fonts one evening and settled on that Segoe UI which like I said cleared up the encoding issue for me.

I know it is an annoying to see screwed up characters. Site design plays a part but Mozilla changed something between v2 and v3 that really brought out these encoding issues.

So the "fix" is to install a whole new font set into Windows??? I don't know...seems ridiculous even though I'm sure you're correct about it doing the trick. A bunch of people suggested View > Character Encoding > Auto-detect > Universal, but that didn't work for me (at least on that Woodstock page).

All I am saying is that is what worked for me.

It only takes a few minutes to do and I do know the branch build seems not to do it unless a site is seriously screwed up. Same for the trunk builds of Fx.

Just to be sure, Is this the setting you are referring to?

I tried that (see above) but this page still displayed with those FFFD glyphs, or whatever they're called. Even rebooted my PC!

This is what I am referring to when I say change the fonts.

I have exactly the same settings and still see the funny little box with four letters in it on the test page. I've been using Segoe UI ever since it became available. Great font, but it doesn't solve this problem for me.

Edit: Fixed now. I changed the character encoding under View to "Western ISO-8859-1". It was set to Unicode (UTF-8) which displays the little squares.

The test page no longer shows the little boxes. The change does not require a reboot or even a reload of Firefox.

Thanks.

Thanks

Those are simply annotations put there by Kees de Lange and Dr. Thomas Schmid (see the top of that page) and can be referenced at the "Sources" link.

Yes, but the character for "film" displays incorrectly using Unicode character encoding. With that it displays the little box which is not intended. Changing the character encoding to "Western" produces a little circle like a degree sign which is what was intended.

Here is the character created by Alt-0176.

°

I'm using the default Western in Firefox 3.0.9 and I'm seeing that little diamond with the question mark in the center for the 'film' notation.

But I guess it doesn't really matter what character gets used, as long as the notation and the reference jibe up with each other.

Whether or not something like this calls for a complete change or update of fonts is, I suppose, something for the individual user to decide.

I'm not seeing a diamond with a question mark. I'm seeing either the degree sign or the little box with four letter.

The site defaults to UTF-8 character encoding, so even though it displays properly (I think) in "Western" you have either manually change the encoding or disallow sites from selecting their own encoding.

I think I'm seeing exactly what you're seeing. I can make changes to get the degree sign (little circle) to appear temporarily, but on its own it will switch back to the FFFD box with a page refresh. At no time do I get the question mark inside a diamond.

I believe you.

Whether or not it's displaying "correctly" for me, I guess I really don't know.
But the notations and the references are in sync, and that's the only thing I personally consider important, as far as in the context of the information we're talking about on that website.
I'm not concerned with which symbol they want to use, at long as it's consistent on both pages.

The subtext issue (so to speak) of the discussion here-- that is, which symbol the site authors intended to be seen-- is kind of an interesting subject, though.

Yes, that's exactly what I see using the Segoe UI font.

For this particular case, the Unknown_Poster has a point that the symbol doesn't really matter. However the FFFD box frequently shows up for other symbols which cannot be displayed properly. I've seen it for apostrophes which are of the wrong type, possibly created on a Mac.

Other times, such as this, I'm not sure what the intended character was supposed to be.

But why does the page show correctly for GK using Segoe UI and not for me? And exactly what does GK see on these pages other than the FFFD box?

Unknown_Poster is also correct that it would be very interesting to know what the author of the web page thought the character should be.