Web character encoding issue

[pokerfan]

This is more of an annoyance than a major show-stopping problem but occasionally I will visit a web page such as http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/nova.htm">this one and the text will render like this:



I'm running Firefox 3.5.5 on Ubuntu 9.10 and the default character encoding is set to Western (ISO 8859-1).

Obviously, I'm not alone:

[RoyGBiv]

1. Fonts ...

Do you have msttcorefonts installed?

I only skimmed quickly, but I think it's using the Vernada font, and if you don't have msttcorefonts, this will render oddly.

It looks fine on Mint 7, FWIW. Well, it's acceptable and doesn't have the Unicode thing going. There is some non-standard stuff going on with the HTML in that page that might be causing some issues.

[pokerfan]

2. Thanks

Installing those fonts didn't change anything but that was something I had wanted to do anyway.

I was able to get Firefox to display the page properly by changing character encoding under the view menu to auto-detect:

[struggle4progress]

3. I'm running Firefox 3.5.5. under Snow Leopard with Western (ISO-8859-1) chosen

as the character encoding, and the page displays fine for me

I then switched to Firefox 3.0.15. under Mint 7 Gloria with Western chosen, and the page still displays fine for me

:shrug:

[pokerfan]

4. Thanks, but I think I got a handle on it

See post #2. Apparently I had character encoding disabled for some reason. I restarted Firefox and the setting held so I'm good to go. I would like to read a decent tutorial on character encoding someday as I don't know much about it.

[struggle4progress]

5. Mine has been working from day one with auto-detect turned off. Since Mint is based

on Ubuntu, I find that odd. You might get an interesting tidbit of info by checking (now that you have it working) whether it still works if you turn auto-detect off again

[pokerfan]

6. Hmmm...

When I switch autodetect off, the diamond question marks return. Very odd.

[RoyGBiv]

7. Curious ...

I notice from your screenshot above that Western (Windows-1252) is ticked rather than Western (ISO-8859-1). Is that the way it was before you turned on auto-detect?

Not sure that it matters since that should work with that page, but I thought I'd ask since what I saw there didn't match what I thought you'd said originally.

In any case, the diamonds are an indication that Unicode was being used. Manually changing encoding to that is the only way I'm able to reproduce what you're seeing.

[pokerfan]

8. Well, that's it.

Now it works either way.

I guess I didn't notice since I already had ISO-8859-1 set as default encoding in the preferences/content/advanced menu. So there are two places within Firefox to set encoding?

Thanks.

[RoyGBiv]

9. I'm not sure how that works ...

Like you, I'm lacking knowledge of this encoding business.

I do know that I've had this problem with Thunderbird for years, and with that there basically are (at least) two places to change this, i.e a default and a per account setting. I've never really gotten into it 'cause I just set it the way I figured out to make it work the way I want and leave it alone from there.

So, seeing as how they're based on the same source code, yeah, probably.