Weird characters instead of letters?

[rosefox911]

Hey there,

For some reason I am seeing this: imgur: the simple image sharer instead of errors. Had this for a while, didn't bother me but I'd like to be able to understand what I am reading xP

 

[stve]

looks like your browser is using the wrong font, check them in browser preferences

 

[Gornot]

I don't think this has anything to do with the font, it's the font encoding method instead. rosefox, which browser do you use?

 

[rosefox911]

I use firefox. Which encoding should I be using?

 

[Gornot]

That's the thing, I have no idea. If you use the US version of FF, the default character encoding will be Western. You can change this, but it's a pain in the @$$ and you'll "have" to do it for every page that displays weird letters.

Click the orange FF button, go to (web) Developer (or something like that) -> Character encoding (or something like that) -> then either choose one of the "defaults" or go to "more" and pick your poison.

Also, did you try to load the page in any other browser? If yes, does it also display like in the screenshot?

 

[rosefox911]

Hey,

It looks fine on IE, this is only a problem with firefox.

 

[Gornot]

I assumed so.

IE automatically detects your region settings and adds the appropriate language to the Appearance options of IE (in case you're not in the US).

I don't have FF installed anymore, so this is all coming from memory and experience, but I think you can set another default encoder, probably by clicking the orange FF button then Web Developer -> Encoding in FF. To compare, in IE9 it's under View->Encoding->Auto-select (you may have to hit the ALT key on your keyboard to temporarily reveal the main bar first, unless you have it permanently pinned to the UI)

 

[Gornot]

Go to Firefox's options and use the option that changes displayed fonts. Near the bottom of the config window there should be a drop-down list for default character encoding. Though, like I said before, it may not work all the time, depending on the page you're actually loading. If the page is in Russian, then the encoding that corresponds to that language will display the page properly upon reload. But if the page is in Cyrillic, and you may not know the difference (which may be somewhat small, but are there) the page will still display wrong.

Worst of all, some web designers can mix up the code and make the page totally glitched no matter what you try do to.

Personally, I don't have many issues like that with IE9, which is (one of many) reason(s) I use it as my only browser. Don't really know what else to tell you.
Perhaps if you could send us some of those links which display the weird characters, I can check up on them and suggest a possible font encoding which may work...