Firefox is screwing up text or did I do it?

February 17, 2010 8:23 PM

I'm having a little trouble with I would guess some character encoding on some websites but I can't seem to fix it.

Last week I installed Windows 7 Ultimate on my computer. I stupidly just copied some fonts into the font folder and chose to overwrite all the fonts in there. Since then I have had some problems on websites with text showing up. Example 1 and example 2. If I cut and paste these sentences they show up as regular text anywhere I paste it to. I've tried changing the character encoding but that doesn't help. This is only happening in Firefox 3.6, Chrome is showing the same things fine.

I have tried to reinstall all the fonts that come with windows 7 by taking them from another computer, but the problem is still there. Is there anything else that I'm missing that could be causing this? Is it a specific font that's screwed up and missing?

posted by lilkeith07 to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

That looks like page encoding problems. Setting the default encoding as mentioned on that page ( View->Character Encoding->More Encodings) should help. Also try the "Auto-Detect" entry right next to it to override the assumed encoding and try a different one - one of them should give you a legible page.
posted by idiopath at 9:05 PM on February 17, 2010

Specifically: junk text like that shows up when an app tries to render unicode as if it were an older pre-unicode western characterset. Generally utf-8 or utf-16 will be most likely to render a document properly in my experience.
posted by idiopath at 9:07 PM on February 17, 2010

Response by poster: "Auto-Detect" was and is on. I tried changing all the encodings to utf-16 and utf-8 as well as some others and its still happening. I also tried to change the default font from Arial to Calibri and the characters were still screwed up.
posted by lilkeith07 at 10:40 AM on February 18, 2010

One quick way to make sure you have a font that can render all of unicode is to get the 60 day trial version of the latest ms office, as mentioned here.
posted by idiopath at 11:08 AM on February 18, 2010

Response by poster: I had Office 2007 installed so I uninstalled it and reinstalled it and that didn't fix it. I think its more of a firefox problem since I set the same settings as chrome and chrome shows up fine but firefox is still messed up. I tried reinstalling firefox but that also didn't work.
posted by lilkeith07 at 12:02 PM on February 18, 2010

What is your default font for firefox (Edit->Preferences->Content)? Try changing it to Arial, since that is the MS font that includes the widest range of unicode.
posted by idiopath at 12:28 PM on February 18, 2010

Response by poster: I think Im narrowing it down. I changed the default font to Arial and that didn't change anything. However under advanced settings I unclicked "allow sites to choose their own fonts" and that fixed it however now all websites formatting is screwed up.
posted by lilkeith07 at 1:06 PM on February 18, 2010

Response by poster: It seems that the problem I was having was that I had Helvetica as a bitmap font and once I installed the true type version everything worked out fine. Once I realized that it was a firefox problem I posted it to the firefox forums and got a quick response.
posted by lilkeith07 at 10:59 AM on February 22, 2010