Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Is anyone able to view unicode websites properly with firefox? I have no issues with IE, but firefox just doesn't seem to like any of the settings i have. Single charecters come out fine, while the majority of the two letter combinations are inverted. Has anyone seen and set this right?

6 comments:

Keybold said...

I have no problems viewing unicode sites in firefox. They turn up exactly as they should.

In some cases the html or xhtml document may declare a different charset like 'iso-8859-1' instead of UTF-8.
Did you try to manually switch the encoding to UTF-8
by using the menu View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) ??

Krishna said...

OK, one quick example is viewing http://www.kumudam.com. Iam not sure whether the font they use is unicode, but IE shows this site properly, while firefox goofs up even though i set the encoding to user defined!

Keybold said...

Krishna, Kumudam does not use the Unicode encoding at all. They use there own encoding built on top of ANSI. You are able to see the tamil text in IE because they use an Activex control(unsupported in Mozilla and co.) to launch Bitstream Fontplayer to dynamically show the font. For people using Firefox, the only way is to download the ttf font from ( http://www.kumudam.com/kumudam.ttf ) and install it in your machine. However since the webpage declares "x-user-defined" as the charset (which is ok for dynamic fonts but not for the others), you have to change the character encoding to 'ISO-8859-1'
using View->Character Encoding->"Western ISO-8859-1"
It then works as you would expect.

Krishna said...

KG, Kumudam is fine now. But check out this site. http://mynose.blogspot.com/. i have set the encoding to UTF-8, but as i explained in my post, multi-charecter letters appear to be inverted, for eg, tamil "the", "kaalai" in tamil...
IE shows these perfectly.

Keybold said...

This is strange...may be there's some problem with your configuration. I don't see any problem in the display of tamil characters on the blog u mentioned (see screenshot - http://www.muselog.net/images/tamscreen.jpg ).

Check.. Tools -> options : General : Fonts & Colours :
Fonts for (select tamil from the listbox) and see to it that the serif, sans-serif and monospace fonts point to "Latha".

If the problem persists, you should try re-installing firefox after removing all the files in your
\Documents and Settings\*your username*\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox apart from the main firefox installation.

Anonymous said...

I have the same problem (in Firefox). Even going to blogger.com shows most of the text as question marks. I changed it to UTF-8 (and other things as suggested) but without success. Blogger pages and this Tamil site are the only web pages I have that seem to have this problem.
~V. Seward