windows xp - Why only some unicode characters are visible on Firefox?

08
2014-07
  • Rookie

    I can't see some unicode characters for some reason.

    I tried to fix this by getting Arial Unicode MS font as suggested in here: Why does Firefox not render some characters?

    Unfortunately it changed nothing.

    I am having problems viewing this wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Month

    At this part the problem is visible:

    enter image description here

    Elsewhere I see arabic etc. letters perfectly! What can be the problem and how to fix it?

    • Answers
  • Jukka K. Korpela

    Arial Unicode MS does not contain Khmer characters, so it won’t help here.

    Firefox is generally able to render a character if any font installed in your computer contains a glyph for it. In your case, there is apparently no such font. On Windows 7 and 8, there is at least the Khmer UI font available. A few other fonts contain Khmer characters: Code2000, DaunPenh, MoolBoran, Sun-ExtA, and GNU Unifont (bitmap). E.g., Sun-ExtA can be downloaded from Alan Wood’s font download page.


    • Related Question

    unicode - Why does Firefox not render some characters?
  • Loren Pechtel

    An example just showed up on here:

    http://superuser.com/questions/59732/command-key-a-doesnt-work-to-select-text-in-several-mac-text-edit-fields

    I see the text as starting with a ( followed by a square that has 23 on top and 18 on the bottom and the same thing shows up in the first paragraph of the body.

    I have seen this sort of thing at various places around the web, it seems to happen mostly in things I believe were prepared in a word processor.

    When it happens it can at times happen so much that the page is hard to read. Many of the offending boxes (they don't always contain the same numbers) seem to occur where apostrophes should be.

    Google seems to say this is what Firefox does when it can't render a Unicode character but why is this happening and what can be done about it?

    Edit: The answer I accepted fixed only some cases, not all of them.

    Some examples that remain: ’“”

    By context I think these are an apostrophe, an opening quote and a closing quote.


    • Related Answers
  • schnaader

    That's most likely an error with a missing Unicode font. I had this, too and I found the best way to solve this is to install the Arial Unicode MS font (ARIALUNI.TTF) which has a size of 22 MB and is shipped with Microsoft Office and Microsoft FrontPage.

  • Daniel H

    If you're referring to East-Asian characters, there's page on wikipedia to help with this: Help:Multilingual support (East Asian)

    That doesn't help displaying the "Command"-character used in the posting on superuser.com to which you linked.

  • RMontes

    The three particular points you mention, , , and , belong to a range that is supposed to be read in an old encoding, not Unicode. You would have to change it to another one. I believe that if you want them to be quotes and an apostrophe, you would have to change it to some Western encoding, but I don't know which. Go on view > Character Encoding > More Encodings > Western European.