Tim: >> On all pages, or just some? Frédéric Bron: > It's funny you ask that question because I did not look further: just > searched anything on google like "bonjour". > Now I have tested other sites and in fact it is only the google site. > yahou is fine for example. You may want to try flushing your browser cache, in case you have some mangled google content stuck in the cache. >> 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). > Yes, I also checked the encoding and UTF-8 was selected. Nothing else > worked. I'm still using an old version, so the information I'm providing pertains to how things are expected to work, in general: The default encoding scheme is what your browser will use when the webserver doesn't identify what scheme is being used. If the server provides the information, the browser will make use of it. So, a default setting should only help with broken sites. Some other browsers allow you to set an over-ride, to ignore a site's declared encoding scheme. UTF-8 is a good choice to use. It's compatible with old sites which sent US-ASCII without identifying it. It's mostly compatible with iso-8859-1 (the next better than 7-bit ASCII scheme), and Microsoft's Win-1252 (which is almost the same). It's closely compatible with several other iso-8859-something schems for various non-English countries, with most of the ROMAN alphabet being compatible, though various symbols and language-specific characters will be wrong. In short, I wouldn't expect to see a page of totally unreadable content unless I'd picked something like an Asian or Arabic type of encoding scheme. There is also a "View menu" setting (in the main browser window) for the encoding scheme, which lets you pick temporary overrides that will apply to the current page (reload, or navigate away, and that override is lost). Inside it is an "auto-detect" sub-menu, related to trying to identify non-English pages via some unexplained method that may get it completely wrong, I leave that "off." Since I can't read any of those languages, it's pointless to me. It can get it wrong, and misdiagnose an English page as some other language, and mess up the page display. Though it's usually just an ugly mess, rather than a completely unreadable mess. Firefox has some related Font settings around the same part of its preferences as the default encoding scheme selection. You can select specific fonts for certain languages (though this will depend on the website identifying the language used on the page, and bad sites probably won't bother). Again, the default choices ought to work fine, and the choice is more about aesthetics, or working around specific problems. On my browsers, the defaults work fine on just about all sites. The fonts for Western language pages are the original basic proportional fonts are serif, generic serif fonts use a font called serif, generic sans-serif fonts use a font actually called sans-serif, and generic monospace fonts use a font actually called monospace. That takes care of pages that either don't specify a font, or just specify a basic font group (serif/sans-serif/monospace), without specifying a particular font to be used. Years ago I installed various international font packages so that foreign webpages did load up with their proper characters, even though I couldn't read those languages. The sites look better that way, and I can tell that the site is foreign rather than broken. I think I've covered everything that I can think of, by now. If you've got the basic fonts installed (on my old system, liberation-sans-fonts, liberation-serif-fonts, liberation-mono-fonts, liberation-fonts-common packages, likewise with the similar dejavu- font packages), there ought to be enough standard fonts available to view most pages. And we're back to wondering if you really have a clean Firefox configuration, or a wider OS installation problem. -- [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. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
