Pubctuation display problem

[John Falk]

Why do I sometimes run into a punctuation anomaly
> (apostrophes,quote marks,etc.) which display on my website page as
> a question mark within a black triangle? Is there a cure?
> Thanks very much for your early response.
> John

[lanux128]

what browser are you using and what is your keyboard setting? some details would be more helpful..

[cyberdiva]

John, I've come upon that problem from time to time.  I think it's caused by the website's using a different character encoding format than the one your computer is set for.  But you can change that to accommodate other character encodings.  Just go to the computer's top menu and choose View and then Character Encoding.  You'll see a number of choices.  I usually have mine set for Western (ISO-8859-1).  But sometimes, when I get the question mark you mentioned, I just try one of the other encodings, and that usually works.  I then turn it back to my usual setting once I've finished with the website in question.  (FWIW, I haven't found that "auto-detect" works well for me, so I have it set to Off.)

I should add that Firefox is my default browser, and what I've said above refers to my experience with Firefox.  But I think other browsers also have a character encoding setting under View--I know Opera does.

I hope this helps.

[mouser]

I think it's important that you clarify, in terms of choosing a fix, if your aim is:

• To edit your web page so that you and others don't see such bad characters in the future.
• To quickly change your browser settings so that you personally can view the page properly, without caring what others viewing the page see.

[app103]

Microsoft has a page about installing language support, which should be your first stop: http://www.microsoft...user/xpintlsupp.mspx

And if that doesn't fix it, this page might help with configuring your system and browser properly: http://unicode.org/h...isplay_problems.html

And then take a look on the table on this page. Pay particular attention to what you see in the column marked "in own script" If you can't see the characters as they should be, go to the last column and look for a little black box to download the font to make it work. Install those fonts, then go back to the page and check again.

[mouser]

what i was trying to get at is that some of the solutions people are suggesting are needed when the web page itself specifies the wrong character encoding for the content of the page.  so if it's your web page and you want to fix the problem at it's root -- it may be that you need to change the character encoding line on the header of the page you are making, or else fix the extended ascii characters on the page that look ok to you in your text editor but are not part of the normal default character encoding set.

[cyberdiva]

And then take a look on the table on this page. Pay particular attention to what you see in the column marked "in own script" If you can't see the characters as they should be, go to the last column and look for a little black box to download the font to make it work. Install those fonts, then go back to the page and check again.

-app103 (August 14, 2010, 09:41 AM)

Hi.  I'm not sure whether your message is meant for John (the OP) or for me.  I just want to say that I have no problem >95% of the time with character encoding on web pages.  Also, I went to the page you've mentioned and had no problem seeing all the characters.  It's not that I need different fonts or that I've set up my system improperly.  But occasionally I'll come upon a website that uses a character-encoding format that doesn't work well with the one I've set as my default.  That's when I simply go into the View menu and change the character encoding setting to one that works for that page.

[app103]

My post was directed at anyone that has a problem. The first thing to check is if you can display all the characters first. Once you know you can, then it's a matter of figuring out why they aren't showing.

If you don't know if you can, then this is a good way to find out.