Greek characters not coming out correctly on Firefox 48
 

When I use Firefox to look up a Wikipedia article containing Greek characters, only the upper-case ones come out correctly. Instead of lower case Greek, I get a weird script which I can't identify, full of backward-sloping lines.

If I look at the same page in Links, the Greek comes out normally.

What must I do to make Firefox show foreign scripts properly?

For the page in question, can you try View->Text Encoding->Unicode.

Also, can you say what the Request Header Accept-Language and Accept-Charset settings are at the foot of this page: http://validator.w3.org/i18n-checker...lidate-by-uri+

It's already set to Unicode. Validator shows:
Accept-Language en-US,en
Accept-Charset None found

Oh well, back to square one. That's exactly what I have and the page displays fine on my machine. I can't even emulate that strange character set you're seeing by changing my View encoding (I'd be interested to find out what it is!).

Which version of Firefox are you using? Are you experiencing character encoding problems anywhere else?

I'm assuming that your locale is set up as en_GB across the board, as mine is.

Ok, next attempt.

Edit->Preferences->Content->Fonts & Colours->Advanced

What are your settings for "Fonts for Greek"?

I have serif, serif, sans-serif, monospace; "Allow pages" ticked; Fallback text encoding: Default for current locale.

I have the same at all points.

It's Firefox 48 btw. I put that in the post title. Locale is en_GB.UTF-8.

Ah, so you did. :-)

If you have any add-ons, can you try launching Firefox in "Safe" mode (Help->Restart with Addons disabled)? I know that this is unlikely to solve the problem, but it just takes a minute to cross it off the list.

Then after that, can you try restarting Firefox with a new profile (firefox -P from the command line) in case your profile has become corrupted in some way?

Nope, safe mode doesn't change it. To test the profile, I moved .mozilla away to a safe place, then used firefox -P to create a new one. Still no joy. I'm back with the old profile now.

Tomorrow I'm going to try in other distros. I've got Crux and Debian on this machine as well as the LFS I mostly work in. I suggest we call it a day for now and I'll report tomorrow what the other Firefox/Iceweasel installations did with the same page. But if anyone reading this can identify the script from the thumbnail, I'd be fascinated to know.

I've just tried on Crux, where I have Firefox 50. This version renders Greek characters correctly except that it does not recognise the character eta. So I'm beginning to think it's a bug in Firefox 48.

Are you able to temporarily upgrade your version of Firefox on the original machine to 50 and see if that does indeed solve the problem?

If not, you could always try running an AppImage (a portable version in effect) of Firefox 50 on the original machine and see what that gives. I don't know if AppImage have older versions of packages available - perhaps you could contact them and they could provide you with a Firefox 48 one which you could compare and contrast?

https://bintray.com/probono/AppImages

(Note: I haven't tried running an AppImage yet).

The script you're seeing is fascinating, almost having an Arabic style without being Arabic or one of its close relations. I had another look around for it last night but couldn't find it.

The development version of LFS has Firefox 51.0.1 so I built that. It still shows the same weird script. So...not a bug after all. It's a trivial issue but I hate it when computers don't behave logically.

I have however identified the script. It's a form of Syriac. Abiword is very good on foreign scripts and it includes this font under the name of Serto Kharput.

Furthermore it's site-specific. The Wikipedia article on Syriza does this, but Syriza's own page syriza.gr does not, except for the page title (shown on the title bar) and some Twitter feeds.

Nice find, Hazel. From that, and leaning heavily on this page: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=210303 , what are the results of:

fc-match serif

fc-match sans-serif

fc-match monospace

They're all Luxi TTF fonts

Ok. Does

fc-match --all | grep Syriac

and

fc-match --all | grep Serto

produce anything of note (e.g. any generic fonts that match to those fonts)?

fc-match --all | grep Syriac
fc-match --all | grep Serto