Text character displayed as little box containg four letters

[Roger-r]

When a text article is displayed sometimes one character is replaced by a
tiny character sized box containing four letters, one pair above another.
As an example: a sentence in quotation marks has the opening quotation mark
shown properly, but the closing quotation mark is replaced by a little box
containing the letters FF and FD. (-possibly - too small to be sure)
Perhaps these are the Unicode reference of the intended character.

Checked the character map at Start>Programs>Accessories>System
Tools>Character Map and all looks in order, but there are a lot of fonts.
On a displayed page where the problem is occurring the fonts are possibly
Helvetica, Arial or Verdana, (sans-serif types).

Somehow I seem to have deleted some part of a character set, but I don't
know exactly what is missing or how to restore it.
How can it be resolved ?

Roger

 

[Nil]

When a text article is displayed sometimes one character is
replaced by a tiny character sized box containing four letters,
one pair above another.

Displayed in what program?

 

[Roger-r]

Displayed in what program?

Mozilla Firefox. v 3.6.16

 

[Roger-r]

I've seen the same behavior before. I don't know if it will show up here
but I found this word that does it: "ideienbus"

It has something to do with Character encoding, a difference between
Unicode (UTF-8) and Western (ISO-8859-1).

See if the following can help:

http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/strange_characters_in_text

Search for "strange characters appear in text" and see what you find for
the application that you're having this problem with.

The problem occurs using Mozilla Firefox to read newspaper comments.
Thanks for the reference, character encoding, and perhaps Unicode is
something to do with it, but I haven't got a solution yet.

My Firefox character coding is already set to Western (ISO-8859-1)
Changed this to Unicode (UTF-8) and also tried Unicode (UTF-32LE) but
nothing changed.
(Tools>Options>Content>'Fonts & colours' - Advanced>Character Encoding.
Shut down and restarted Firefox between changes just in case)

On this page:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnste/archive/2007/02/27/code-pages-unicode-encodings.aspx
What do you see in the part in brackets in title line:
"I'm not a Klingon (????? ??????)"
In my Internet Explorer the characters in brackets display as empty boxes.
When viewed in Firefox the boxes have code letters in them.
Do you see two words ?

 

[Patok]

The problem occurs using Mozilla Firefox to read newspaper comments.
Thanks for the reference, character encoding, and perhaps Unicode is
something to do with it, but I haven't got a solution yet.

My Firefox character coding is already set to Western (ISO-8859-1)
Changed this to Unicode (UTF-8) and also tried Unicode (UTF-32LE) but
nothing changed.
(Tools>Options>Content>'Fonts & colours' - Advanced>Character Encoding.
Shut down and restarted Firefox between changes just in case)

On this page:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnste/archive/2007/02/27/code-pages-unicode-encodings.aspx
What do you see in the part in brackets in title line:
"I'm not a Klingon (????? ??????)"
In my Internet Explorer the characters in brackets display as empty boxes.
When viewed in Firefox the boxes have code letters in them.
Do you see two words ?

But in the above example page, it is *expected* to see nothing (or boxes with
codes). That's because you don't have the Klingon font installed - it is not
normally part of Unicode, you have to install it. It installs in the "Private
use" area of Unicode - F8D0 to F8FF. I don't have it either - and I see
character boxen, both in Windows and in Ubuntu Firefox.

I have noticed such boxes in other places too, and always attribute them to
some non-standard font and character used by the author. I may be wrong, though.
Anybody know differently?

 

[Roger-r]

But in the above example page, it is *expected* to see nothing (or boxes
with codes). That's because you don't have the Klingon font installed - it
is not normally part of Unicode, you have to install it. It installs in
the "Private use" area of Unicode - F8D0 to F8FF. I don't have it either -
and I see character boxen, both in Windows and in Ubuntu Firefox.

I have noticed such boxes in other places too, and always attribute them
to some non-standard font and character used by the author. I may be
wrong, though. Anybody know differently?

Thanks for the notes, the Klingon page was not a good example for as you say
a special font is required to see the characters.

Newspaper 'comment' type pages don't normally require any special fonts but
you are probably right that the (various) author is using some non standard
character or font that the page cannot resolve.

Roger