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There are several Unicode charactes I'm just seeing as boxes. This happens in Chrome only. The Character Encoding is set to UTF-8, but Autodetection doesn't help.

Example: [⁠]

You will only see two square brackets, but actually there is the Unicode Character World Joiner in between. It's a zero-width non-breaking space.

I also put together a little jsfiddle demo. I can't see the World Joiner character, but I can see the Hair Space. (And by seeing it I actually mean I don't see it. You see?)

This also happens when people post some new style emoticons etc.

How can I fix this?

Update:

This happens everywhere (Twitter, Facebook, you name it). I'm not using special fonts or have changed something font-related on my system (Windows 7, 64 bit). Am I wrong assuming this should just work?

Update 2:

This drives me insane. There are still so many characters that are not displaying.

Example (wrapped gift): 🎁

Using Segoe UI Symbol explicitly via dev tools

As you can see, Chrome is not displaying the character by default. Only when I explicitly set the font to Segoe UI Symbol, it does. Why is Chrome not using the font as a fallback automatically?

How can I make Chrome recognize the Segoe UI Symbol font?

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    maybe try this gschoppe.com/blog/fixing-unicode-support-in-google-chrome says "Code2000, Code2001, and Code2002 are three true-type fonts that were designed by James Kass in 2008. They are known as a Pan-Unicode font set, designed to contain as many glyphs as possible. They were available for free, from Kass’ website, until it went down in 2011." and he gives a link to te zip gschoppe.com/projects/fbformat/includes/unicodefont.zip
    – barlop
    Jan 22, 2014 at 19:19
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    He says "download the ZIP, extract the files, and copy them into your fonts directory in control panel. After a quick restart, Chrome will have full unicode support"
    – barlop
    Jan 22, 2014 at 19:20
  • @barlop Well, I had that in my search results, too. I wasn't all too keen about installing some fonts from a foreign site, but well... it worked. Thank you. You can post it as an answer so I can accept/upvote. ;) Jan 22, 2014 at 19:31
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    Code2000 etc. do not provide full Unicode support. Jan 22, 2014 at 20:15
  • @JukkaK.Korpela Good to know. Do you know how to improve the Unicode support? Jan 22, 2014 at 20:17

2 Answers 2

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http://www.fontspace.com/james-kass/code2000 (3.73MB)

Code2000 font — Created in 1998 by James Kass .. Code2000 is a work-in-process. It currently (Version 1.171) has over 60000 glyphs.

Although it is more-or-less readable at 12 - 18 point, it is much clearer at about 24 point. Some of the dingbats should be at least 36 point. With font- smoothing it looks good at normal sizes.

There is a blog that mentions it
http://gschoppe.com/blog/fixing-unicode-support-in-google-chrome/
But the blog gets lots of things wrong in its description. (See comments on your question, for some examples. But his description doesn't matter)

You found the instructions mentioned on the blog worked, which was to extract the zip into the fonts folder in control panel and restart chrome.

http://gschoppe.com/projects/fbformat/includes/unicodefont.zip

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Boxes or squares showing up in place of actual glyphs is a side-effect of the font you are using not having that Unicode character incorporated. Try looking for a font with a more complete Unicode implementation.

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    Doesn't the browser check other system fonts if they have the missing glyphs? Jan 22, 2014 at 19:17
  • I was going to add that you can try and check this and try and change the default font. Jan 22, 2014 at 19:18
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    @kleinfreund, my understanding is that it will check other typefaces in the same family, but won't go beyond that. So if your site is in Arial, it won't use Gothic glyphs.
    – DopeGhoti
    Jan 22, 2014 at 19:19

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