probably a silly question

[ADevilishPotato]

Hey, I have a weird font/text question. Whenever my web browser (chrome, but does the same thing on IE as well) tries to display any text that is not "normal" text, it just shows it as a outlined square. This has happened since I booted my computer for the first time. Normally I thought it was the website's fault, but I noticed that my laptop does not have the same problem on the same websites, so it must be my PC's end. Trying to look up a solution on the internet has yielded unhelpful help, so I was wondering if anyone knows what is the issue. I feel like this is a silly question that comes from something I have overlooked, but it has been quite frustrating trying to figure out a solution. Thanks guys.

[Zork Nemesis]

Don't quote me on this, but I believe the boxes typically represent characters that your browser's font libraries don't include or have. Characters like accented vowels, foreign language characters (like Chinese), or Unicode for example. See if you can't find a more complete font library for your browsers. I'd bet Microsoft or Google would have add-ons for additional characters for their respective browsers.

[BigBiker05]

Don't quote me on this, but I believe the boxes typically represent characters that your browser's font libraries don't include or have. Characters like accented vowels, foreign language characters (like Chinese), or Unicode for example. See if you can't find a more complete font library for your browsers. I'd bet Microsoft or Google would have add-ons for additional characters for their respective browsers.

That's exactly right. However, browsers should auto-prompt you to install that font.

[Boss Llama]

As the others said, that represents an uninstalled font. Do you have Microsoft Office installed on your system, or an Adobe suite? If so, you shouldn't be getting that except for extremely bizare custom characters, or certain foreign alphabets - ideographic ones tend to cause the most trouble. Both of those programs have very large typeface libraries that will include every font regularly found on English websites (because most people creating those websites only have the libraries from one or both of those programs). If you do have one of those, and are still getting that issue, there's definitely something wrong with the installation of either that program, or of your web browser. Make sure you don't have some kind of security setting blocking the use of fonts from other programs.

You do say it's a problem when displaying text that isn't "normal," but I'm not 100% on what you mean by that. Are you talking about standard Latin alphabet characters and their varients (such as the é in my name) or do you mean things Chinese semanto-phonetics or Georgian Mkhedruli script?

[Stevo]

What OS are your computers running?

[ADevilishPotato]

@ Alizee, what I meant was things like clipart like letters show as boxes, but most non-English special characters show (but not all, thanks Wiki).

@ stevo, my issue computer is running XP, but my laptop and my office computers run Windows 7 and both of those do not have this problem. And all of them have office 2010 installed

[Stevo]

I remember having the same issue on XP. Unfortunately I don't know of any solution other than upgrading the OS.

[dredfox]

http://www.unicode.org/help/display_problems.html

The instructions here might help.

[The Spanish Inquisition]

This was a problem with some installs where the user has changed his display font size away from standard(100%) to 'larger' or 'extra large.'