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Firefox is not displaying alt codes correctly, substituting a black diamond with a white question mark in their place.

  • 2 cavab
  • 35 have this problem
  • 2 views
  • Last reply by MTS52

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Alt codes (such as ® for "registered" and ™ for "trademark") are being displayed as a small black diamond with a white question mark inside of it. This has also started happening to more simple characters such as exclamation marks, dashes and apostrophes. Any ideas?

Alt codes (such as ® for "registered" and ™ for "trademark") are being displayed as a small black diamond with a white question mark inside of it. This has also started happening to more simple characters such as exclamation marks, dashes and apostrophes. Any ideas?

All Replies (2)

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Does that also happens with those characters in your above post?

Make sure that the correct encoding (View > Character Encoding) is selected.

Press F10 or press and hold the Alt key down to bring up the "Menu Bar" temporarily.

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Thanks for your reply cor-el.

My posting actually included the alt code syntax, and is now rendered as the corresponding special character. I guess this isn't a surprise!

And no, it was rendered just fine. This morning when I went into the browser to see the problem, it was not mis-displaying as it had been...it had somehow changed and was behaving very nicely. That's all fine, but I'm a little bit wary of this FF browser functionality now...steady as she goes.

Also, I did check the (View > Character Encoding) you recommended, and after experimenting a bit discovered that using "Unicode (UTF-8)" made the wierd black diamond/white question mark character come back in all of the same places it was occuring...up until this morning. I've set my browser default to "Western (ISO-8859-1)" now, and everything is displaying as it should.

Thanks for your reply and suggestions. I hope others will learn from these experiences.