2

I can't see some unicode characters for some reason.

I tried to fix this by getting Arial Unicode MS font as suggested in here: Why does Firefox not render some characters?

Unfortunately it changed nothing.

I am having problems viewing this wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Month

At this part the problem is visible:

enter image description here

Elsewhere I see arabic etc. letters perfectly! What can be the problem and how to fix it?

2
  • Those characters are rendered properly for me on Firefox 17.0.1 on Windows 8. The font family specified in the CSS is sans-serif, which is set to Arial on my installation. I believe Windows (at least since 7; I'm unsure about earlier versions) may substitute some characters from other fonts. Also, apparently each Windows release adds new fonts and new scripts to existing fonts - so your running XP may be related. As for seeing those characters in other places, do you mean within Firefox or in other programs? Are they exactly the same characters?
    – Bob
    Jan 1, 2013 at 14:34
  • @Bob, i dont see those characters anywhere. i meant other unicode characters i can see fine.
    – Rookie
    Jan 1, 2013 at 18:38

1 Answer 1

8

Arial Unicode MS does not contain Khmer characters, so it won’t help here.

Firefox is generally able to render a character if any font installed in your computer contains a glyph for it. In your case, there is apparently no such font. On Windows 7 and 8, there is at least the Khmer UI font available. A few other fonts contain Khmer characters: Code2000, DaunPenh, MoolBoran, Sun-ExtA, and GNU Unifont (bitmap). E.g., Sun-ExtA can be downloaded from Alan Wood’s font download page.

8
  • 1
    Great, by downloading the Code2000 font, i was able to see those characters! Do you know any font set which would make me able to view pretty much any unicode characters on the web correctly? I dont want to face this problem again on some other website. Edit: actually the problem persists: the Sinhala calendar section doesnt display any characters correctly. How do you find which font-file contains which characters? I installed all the fonts in that page you shared, but it doesnt make those sinhala words visible.
    – Rookie
    Jan 1, 2013 at 18:54
  • 1
    @Rookie, no single font can cover all of Unicode (there are more characters in Unicode than fit into one font; besides, new characters are added to Unicode). There are various resources like Alan Wood’s site and fileformat.info that may help to find fonts that cover the characters you encounter. For Sinhala, check out FreeSerif at gnu.org/software/freefont Jan 1, 2013 at 20:40
  • 2
    @endolith, no, a single font cannot contain all Unicode characters, since a font can only contain 64K glyphs and there are over 100K characters in Unicode. GNU Unifont covers only the Basic Multilingual Plane (and only as it was defined in Unicode 5.1; there have been some additions since that). Apr 17, 2013 at 3:38
  • 1
    @endolith, 64K limit is emposed by font formats: the way they address glyphs. Yes, you could cover all of current and near future Unicode characters with just two fonts, but in practice such fonts have not been created. Apr 17, 2013 at 4:28
  • 1
    @JukkaK.Korpela: Well, hmmph. There should at least be one fallback font (pack) with some kind of representation of every possible character, so we don't have to look at white boxes.
    – endolith
    Apr 17, 2013 at 13:35

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .