Unicode characters suddenly start displaying as boxes in some applications

Question

I noticed that Unicode characters suddenly stopped displaying in some applications, so far Notepad++ and Skype, when they were appearing previously. Instead they appear as boxes. They were working before, but I believe that it broke after a restart. I can even type them into the Skype input window and see them, but then after submitting the message they appear as boxes.

For example: 햇반 and 県 will not show up in either Skype or notepad++, but they do appear just fine in Chrome as I am typing this.

No new software was installed before or after the last restart, the only thing that happened were some Windows updates. The document in Notepad++ has the encoding set to UTF-8

Windows 7 x64

Answer 1

The obvious suspect is fonts - not all fonts have full unicode support.

Answer 2

I had this issue. Stumbled upon the following setting in Windows 7 (professional):

 Control Panel --> All Control Panel Items --> Fonts --> Font settings

Hide fonts based on language settings was enabled. I disabled it and a big chunk of fonts appeared for me ... which allowed Eclipse to start displaying fonts that had been hidden.

In eclipse, I can now see all the nice UTF-8 characters I was using ... after I adjusted my fonts to allow it again. The original font that was assigned, 'Courier New' was displaying the items as boxes, as you described.

Answer 3

Restarted the computer and the problem still persisted. However, a few hours later I restarted the computer again and this time the characters came back. No clue what happened...

Answer 4

1. Go to "Control Panel" -> "Region and Language" -> "Administrative" -> "Change system locale..."
2. Change the locale to the one you're having problem with, and then change it back.

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