Question marks instead of punctuation

[Shifty]

I have a pernicious problem with the main page on this site. Most, but not all, of the punctuation is replaced by what appear to be bitmaps of questions marks in a black diamond. This happens with apostrophes, commas, and quotation marks, as well as possibly em- or en-dashes. I have to infer what the actual punctuation should be, since they only show these error characters. No other websites seem to be affected.

The frustrating thing is that it's not consistent for a given type of punctuation throughout the page. The newer entries to the news seem to be worse, such as the newest entry, where almost anything more complicated than a full stop seems to be rendering improperly. Some of the commas are there, some of them aren't, and it generally makes the postings extremely difficult to read. The forum's fine, though.

For the record, I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.14, Windows XP SP2, and I've got my character encoding set to UTF-8.

So, anybody got any ideas?

[Guildorn Tanaleth]

It's got to be an encoding problem. I sometimes encounter the same kind of thing with Safari on Mac OS X, and I solve it by switching to ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1).

[Shifty]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I tried that. I've gone through ISO-8859-1 and -15, UTFs 7, 8, 16 (vanilla, big and little endian), 32 (big and little), no dice. As a test, I checked with Internet Exploder, and it worked fine. This is no comfort to me, as I'd sooner go licking open sores in a sanitarium than travel the tubes with IE, but it casts doubt on Firefox. I suspect Java, mostly because I suspect Java of everything bad that happens on the internet. Going to reinstall Firefox now.

Edit: Gah... Upgraded to Firefox 3RC1. Still doesn't work in UTF-8, but does in ISO-8859-1. Partial success. Why can't we just standardize to Unicode and be done with it?

[Zherog]

I use Firefox both at home and work. The news displays fine at work, but at home I get the question mark/diamond thingies.

[Neftren]

It's got to be an encoding problem. I sometimes encounter the same kind of thing with Safari on Mac OS X, and I solve it by switching to ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1).

Hmm, my Safari doesn't have that problem...


Shifty: Because some people like to be different :smalltongue:

[Zeb The Troll]

I agree that it sounds like an encoding thing.

As a test (I use IE7) I manually switched to UTF-8 (gave me the squares) and Western European (ISO), which appears to work fine. When I go back to Autoselect it chooses Western European (Windows).

Unfortunately, I'm at work and don't have access to Firefox of any flavor, but I'll check it when I get home, where I tend to go back and forth between the two.

[Shhalahr Windrider]

Definitely a problem with UTF-8 encoding.

Using Opera on Mac Tiger, and I get the problem when I switch to UTF-8. I normally keep it on "Automatic Selection" and am unsure what it chooses normally.

Hm... The source for the news page doesn't seem to specify any encoding. So it likely defaults to whatever the editor that saves the code is using. Probably the aforementioned ISO-8859-1, or something compatible. (BTW, the vBulletin forum pages do explicitly use ISO-8859-1.)

Does Firefox not have an "Automatic Selection" option for encoding?

[Zherog]

I don't even know what utf8 and iso-whatever are, let alone what "encoding" is... Given I don't even know what it is, I have no idea where to look in Firefox for it.

[B-Man]

For Firefox:

View -> Character Encoding

That's where you would be able to switch the encoding in the browser.

[Shifty]

... Does Firefox not have an "Automatic Selection" option for encoding?

It does. I'm just a silly bugger and didn't see it hiding under Ukrainian in the Auto Detect dialog. Of course, now I've gone and borked the punctuation on 365 Tomorrows (http://www.365tomorrows.com), which might be even more damaging to my world view than GiTP having weird marks in it.

Maybe it's time for a Mac. Supposedly they "just work." Unless, of course, you're trying to play games.

[Neftren]

It does. I'm just a silly bugger and didn't see it hiding under Ukrainian in the Auto Detect dialog. Of course, now I've gone and borked the punctuation on 365 Tomorrows (http://www.365tomorrows.com), which might be even more damaging to my world view than GiTP having weird marks in it.

Maybe it's time for a Mac. Supposedly they "just work." Unless, of course, you're trying to play games.

Run a Parallel using Boot Camp, and you have access to every game on the planet... basically. Just install Windows.

[Shifty]

Run a Parallel using Boot Camp, and you have access to every game on the planet... basically. Just install Windows.

That'd solve the problem, but if I was willing to fiddle with dual boots and suchlike, I probably wouldn't be complaining about the fiddliness of character rendering, now would I? :smallwink:

[Shhalahr Windrider]

I don't even know what utf8 and iso-whatever are, let alone what "encoding" is... Given I don't even know what it is, I have no idea where to look in Firefox for it.
Character encoding refers to the way text characters are stored and transmitted in computer code. Naturally, there are a crapload of different ways this is done, even within the same character set. And since Da Intarweb is supposed to offer ultimate accessibility, a web browser has to handle pretty much every single encoding scheme out there. If you ever go into your browser menus and find a list of languages like "Western, Cyrillic, Central European, Greek, etc." that's gonna be where your encoding options are (the encoding schemes are generally sorted by which alphabets they can handle).

UTF-8 and ISO-"whatever" are just names for two different encoding schemes. If you've heard of ASCII, that's another, largely defunct encoding scheme.


It does. I'm just a silly bugger and didn't see it hiding under Ukrainian in the Auto Detect dialog. Of course, now I've gone and borked the punctuation on 365 Tomorrows (http://www.365tomorrows.com), which might be even more damaging to my world view than GiTP having weird marks in it.
Hm.

So the automatic selection is kinda broken on your browser? Figures.

Conveniently enough, 365 Tommorows is UTF-8.

[Zherog]

Yes, I've heard of ASCII. Sadly enough, I'm a computer programmer. The world's most computer-illiterate computer programmer, it seems...

[SteveMB]

It's got to be an encoding problem. I sometimes encounter the same kind of thing with Safari on Mac OS X, and I solve it by switching to ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1).

I had a desktop and laptop both running Firefox and using ISO-8859-1 character encoding -- the laptop displayed fine, the desktop showed the diamond-question-mark symbols. Switching the desktop to IBM-850 seems to have fixed it.

EDIT: And now it turns up with the question marks in either character encoding when I go to the top giantitp.com page... and they turn into proper punctuation when I click on the link to any of the individual news items.

[Shhalahr Windrider]

Yes, I've heard of ASCII. Sadly enough, I'm a computer programmer. The world's most computer-illiterate computer programmer, it seems...
Eh, all that means is you've never had to make a program that required knowledge of character encoding.