On Wed, 2017-04-12 at 17:55 +0200, Frédéric Bron wrote: > firefox now shows characters as squares instead of normal letters so > that it is unusable. On all pages, or just some? > I removed all history but it did not change anything. > I created a new profile but it is still the same. > > I found one thing that works: untick "allow websites to use their own fonts". > > But why? I would check if that computer has the usual fonts installed. Usually, browsers will try to use the suggested font, and fall back on alternatives. And usually, you have enough alternatives that it can always show a page, even if not as pretty as the designer hoped for. If you hadn't said that you'd reset the profile, I would have first suggested to check that you hadn't set a peculiar default character encoding scheme. The text you read is encoded (each character has a number, in ASCII the letter A is character number 65). The default (when a webserver has provided no information about the encoding it used), for the web was US-ASCII (these days, a default of UTF-8 is a reasonable choice). If a webserver was going to use some other scheme, it should say what it used, and your browser should follow it. Once computing went international, other countries would start using their own usual character encoding scheme. They also should have declared what the use, but incompetently run services often don't, and users would preset their browser to a non-US-ASCII scheme to compensate. Usually, there were enough characters in each different scheme that were similar that you could read a page, but with a few errors. That meant you could put up with it, or were presented with the clue to how to work around the problem (change your settings). Though there are some encoding schemes that could be used that would render near complete garbage for any page. But as I said before all this detail, resetting your profile would have fixed a problem caused by choosing such a scheme. The likelihood is that you're missing fonts that it expects to always be present, or somehow have screwed up the fontmapping (how your computer chooses different fonts to use, that it has available, instead of the ones its asked to use that it doesn't have). But since you've brought up various issues on the list, which I would consider unrelated, it's entirely possibly that you have some serious screwups with your entire OS installation. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64 Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages posted to the mailing list. I don't think it's pure coincidence that "officialdom" sounds the same as "official dumb." _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
