Special Characters in Firefox

spaceballs · 03-06-2006, 08:29 AM

I was trying to read a wikipedia article recently, and Firefox wouldn't translate several characters [they appear as four little boxes]. Some languages I know it won't resolve, but these were mathematical characters. Is there any resolution to this?

I also find all of the language untranslatables annoying. Is there any way to get everything resolved? I am using the most recent slackware packaging of firefox.

satinet · 03-06-2006, 08:47 AM

can't you just install the relevant foriegn language pack?

spaceballs · 03-06-2006, 08:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by satinet

can't you just install the relevant foriegn language pack?

I surely would if someone could tell me how that is done. Is it a firefox thing, or is it an X thing?

What pack would mathematical characters be a part of?

dive · 03-06-2006, 08:52 AM

Do you have a link to this page?

satinet · 03-06-2006, 09:00 AM

i dunno - don't you just go to "tool -> options -> advanced -> languages"

i think you can add support for other languages in there.... i guess the mathmatical thing might be a font issue....

spaceballs · 03-06-2006, 11:10 AM

I noticed a similar problem once [that I never got resolved] where if you made the " symbol, then it was replaced by the same untranslated characters that I am seeing here. I am certain that I am not the only techie to ever see this. I didn't see anything in the language packs that seemed to fix it.

I installed the international support for KDE, too.

KMcD · 03-06-2006, 11:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by satinet

i dunno - don't you just go to "tool -> options -> advanced -> languages"

i think you can add support for other languages in there.... i guess the mathmatical thing might be a font issue....

that should be "edit -> preferences -> advanced -> general -> edit languages".

hussar · 03-06-2006, 12:47 PM

Does "edit -> preferences -> advanced -> general -> edit languages" have anything to do with what fonts are used? I always thought it only set the users preference for which language version of a page to display if there were more than one language available.

For what its worth, a while back I got tired of seeing all those little boxes with hexadecimal numbers in them at the bottom of the google.com page. I tried changing my default character set to unicode 16, but that didn't have any effect.

spaceballs · 03-07-2006, 05:01 AM

Would it make any difference if I were to recompile from source, as opposed to using Pat's slackware package? I am downloading it now; we will see if it makes much difference.

piete · 03-07-2006, 05:23 AM

I think you might be on the wrong track with recompiling from source.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/

I think all in the info you need is there.

- Piete.