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David

6:10 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

I had a customer email me last night that my pages were coming up with unreadable signs and symbols. I can't recreate what she is seeing. I emailed her back and asked for info on OS and stuff.

She is from USA , Windows NT using Explorer and it is all pages from index on.

These pages validate at w3c.

Any Ideas what could cause this kind of problem.

I am using...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

oilman

6:13 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

what font are you using on the page?

eeblet

6:13 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

I'm sure you've thought of this, but: what font(s) are you using?

David

6:18 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

I am using a generic css.

font-family:serif;font-style:normal

Thanks

joshie76

7:00 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

I reckon it's got to be down to the font-family:serif.

Probably best to have the serif as the 'spare' font if none of your chosen ones are present on the client: eg.

font-family: Times New Roman, Times, serif;

Worth a try at least. Interesting one.

pageoneresults

7:10 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

Ask them if the characters appear to be Arabic. I had some problems with IE about a year ago where parts of web pages were appearing in characters that looked like Arabic. I can't remember what I did to correct this but it was at the browser level.

I would definitely use Joshie's suggestion on specifying a particular font family and using the serif as the fallback font...

font-family:times new roman, times, garamond, serif;

No need to have the font-style:normal; as this is the default setting for browsers. Or at least that is my understanding. Someone, somewhere will probably dispute this one. I don't use it and have tested across multiple platforms and browsers and all appears fine.

(edited by: pageoneresults at 7:15 pm (utc) on April 23, 2002)

David

7:10 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

I may give that a try but..

I thought that by assigning the family name the browser would then choose an available font there by keeping this kind of problem from happening.

Am I wrong ?

pageoneresults

7:12 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

As a side note, I would also ask the client if they have Zone Alarm installed on their system. There is an issue with one of the 3.0 releases where characters were appearing on web pages and they should not have been.

One other thing you might try is changing your charset to the windows-1252...

Tapolyai

7:54 pm on Apr 23, 2002 (gmt 0)

ask your customer to do a shift-Print-Screen or Print-Screen, and send you the image of the pages. This might help you narrow the source of the problem..

You might als find out that she runs some esotheric font/language switching product too.

David

7:23 pm on Apr 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

I added the font type and that didn't solve the problem. Here is what is interesting. My client is able to select and copy then paste to MS-word and the text is readable.
She is not sure what version explorer she is using but thinks its the current version. She works in a University Library and says they keep everything up to date.

Any Thoughts?

SmallTime

7:35 pm on Apr 24, 2002 (gmt 0)

Ask her what view/encoding setting she is using - maybe someone reset it for reading something else.

David

11:19 pm on Sep 4, 2002 (gmt 0)

I still haven't figured this out. I get a couple of customers a month with this problem. There is one thing in common.

They are all from Virginia.

Just thought I would bump this up to see if any one has heard of this before.

dhdweb

8:27 pm on Sep 5, 2002 (gmt 0)

They are all from Virginia.

Do they use the same ISP?

David

9:07 pm on Sep 5, 2002 (gmt 0)

<< Do they use the same ISP? >>

Don't know, I wasn't smart enough to ask that question. I sent a couple of emails yesterday, still waiting for replies.

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David

oilman

eeblet

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pageoneresults

David

pageoneresults

Tapolyai

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SmallTime

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dhdweb

David

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