When you don’t have the right international fonts installed you get little square boxes with four numbers in them instead of the right character when trying to view a page in Firefox. I think this also happens in IE and Opera, but I have not tested.
Anyway, the solution is to get the right fonts for your system so it can display international characters. Simply download the following from Microsoft and install (Genuine Advantage pass required):
Traditional Chinese
Simplified Chinese
Japanese
Korean
European Union
Once installed the boxes disappear, and as a bonus .nfo files display correctly too!
2 Comments
I caught my eye on some of the privacy articles here but I don’t understand why there are so many required plugins/extensions or fonts dependent upon microsoft on a supposedly cross-platform, open-source Web browser…
Is there some other way to fix this?? I think I only noticed this since Firefox 3.something…
The problem is not really with Firefox, it’s the underlying operating system. Firefox asks to draw and certain character, and it’s up to the OS to provide a font that has it.
Having said that, I think you are right that it only started being a common problem with V3. I guess the language handling code must have been changed.
If I find any more info I’ll post it.