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Occasional missing Chinese character

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 7 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

EdvinM
EdvinM
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Hi! I've recently been having a problem with displaying some Chinese characters on Firefox. It seems like some Chinese characters don't display at all (no boxes or anything) in some sans-serif fonts.

For example, the character 变 isn't visible as I'm typing in this text box nor is it visible if I type it in the address bar. Also, as shown in the attached image its sans-serif form isn't visible in this page: https://zh.wiktionary.org/zh-hans/%E5%8F%98 while it is perfectly visible on Microsoft Edge. Inspecting the missing character shows that it's using the MS Gothic font.

The English Wiktionary page of the same character (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%98) uses the DengXian font without any problems.

I have the Chinese supplemental fonts installed on my computer (Windows 10) and I have a Japanese system locale.

Hi! I've recently been having a problem with displaying some Chinese characters on Firefox. It seems like some Chinese characters don't display at all (no boxes or anything) in some sans-serif fonts. For example, the character 变 isn't visible as I'm typing in this text box nor is it visible if I type it in the address bar. Also, as shown in the attached image its sans-serif form isn't visible in this page: https://zh.wiktionary.org/zh-hans/%E5%8F%98 while it is perfectly visible on Microsoft Edge. Inspecting the missing character shows that it's using the MS Gothic font. The English Wiktionary page of the same character (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%98) uses the DengXian font without any problems. I have the Chinese supplemental fonts installed on my computer (Windows 10) and I have a Japanese system locale.

All Replies (2)

EdvinM
EdvinM Question owner
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Apparently the image never attached. Here it is.

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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The website specifies font-family: sans-serif as the default font in an @media screen rule if I check this in the Inspector, The fonts tab shows that Firefox is using this font: Droid Sans Fallback. The en.wiktionary.org page uses for me the same font for this character although this page specifies a lot of fonts as possible choices with sans-serif as the last choice. 

 html,body {
  height:100%;
  margin:0;
  padding:0;
  font-family:sans-serif
 }

In your case Firefox appears to be using a font that doesn't have this glyph and doesn't fallback to another font. There might be a problem with the default sans-serif font in Windows and Firefox selects another font.