In HTML documents, how can I get list bullets to display as list bullets again?

December 10, 2003 6:41 PM

For some reason bullets are no longer being displayed as they're supposed to, black dots. Instead they look like some arabic character. [screen grab inside]
posted by Grod to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

This should probably be in Metatalk (as it's a bug report), although I don't think we have an actual policy-thingo to that effect. Matt?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:44 PM on December 10, 2003

Response by poster:
The only thing I can think of is that I recently uninstalled a bunch of fonts I never use, but I left all the core ones in place, so I don't think that's it. Anyone ever have this happen before? Know how to fix it? Hope this isn't to idiotic a question :)
posted by Grod at 6:44 PM on December 10, 2003

Er, sorry I pre-empted your screenshot, there, Grod. Didn't you have one already prepared?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:45 PM on December 10, 2003

Response by poster: Damn, chickenman, that was fast. It is happening on all sites I view, bullets are defaulting to those weird characters instead of bullets. It only happens in IE though, in Firebird and Opera I see normal bullets.

On preview, yes, but I didn't know I'd have to post my [more inside] within a couple minutes :)
posted by Grod at 6:47 PM on December 10, 2003

If you're using IE, hit on the tool bar "View->Encoding" and make sure it's set to Western European or some such. I have a similar problem with lab computers all the time, which, thanks to our school's high exchange student rate, are almost always set to Japanese or Korean.
posted by kaibutsu at 7:29 PM on December 10, 2003

Response by poster: Ahhh, that fixes it. I don't know how that happened but somehow it was set to UTF-8. Thanks!
posted by Grod at 7:37 PM on December 10, 2003

Response by poster: Wait, I take it back, still broken, actually wasn't fixed to begin with, I was looking at a different window. I'd switch to Opera except that I've gotten really used to using the sliding drag on the synaptics touchpad built into my laptop, and Dell hasn't released an updated driver that fixes this problem. Synaptic has, but it doesn't play well with others, for some reason.
posted by Grod at 9:06 PM on December 10, 2003

Grod, here's the list of core fonts for IE. Do you have all these?
posted by taz at 11:38 PM on December 10, 2003

Response by poster: Problem solved!!!
Thanks taz. It wasn't one of the core fonts, but your link reminded me that windows uses special fonts for random things, the min/max buttons and the little gray resize corner for example. Turns out the font for bullets is Wingdings. I would have thought it was Webdings if anything.
Thanks for the help. AskMe rocks!
posted by Grod at 7:41 PM on December 11, 2003

Sorry, BTW, Grod, I just realized this wasn't a MeFi-specific question, and thus is perfectly suitable for AskMe, I think.

My bad. Glad your problem was resolved.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:22 PM on December 12, 2003