A question to our readers (subscribers and random browsers alike) - do you notice certain pages displaying text incorrectly? I have noticed that sometimes on the main page, certain typographical characters are displayed incorrectly. Often “quotation marks” are garbled, for instance. However, if I click through to the individual page entry, the fonts are displayed correctly. Before I start troubleshooting (is it just on posts created on certain computers, or just on posts created in ecto, posts containing text from certain websites, etc.), and open a support ticket at SixApart, I wonder if it is a real problem, or just a problem with my peculiar setup.
Answering this poll would help me out a lot (assuming that it works). If you are feeling generous with your time, leave your system details in comments (but you don't have to do that if you don't want, I can figure out enough about that out by looking at my sitemeter log)
(flash)
Thank you!
(update, I guess the poll will live in the sidebar to the right for a while, even though that's sorta ugly, or else click here)
Hi Seth--
I read via Google Reader and click through for a number of posts, and haven't noticed any problems.
Hello, Seth:
My health is a lot worse and to top it all, our business account with TIME-Warner went kaput.
I have noticed some exogenous letters or symbols but can't precise were. I thought it was an HTML problem.
My mobility is near zero. I posted, though, and hope you like it. If there is anything else, drop me a line.
To followup, I do in fact see the bad quotes in your Surfjan post and others. In Firefox 2 on Windows XP, the quotes appear as an "a" with an circumflex on top of it. Husker Du appears as "Hüsker Dü"--the U with umlaut appears as a capital A with a tilde on top alongside a 1/4. In IE 6, the quotes appear as the circumflex a as before, plus two box characters.
While looking at the posts directly, they are fine, but I noticed that your quotes are different from a standard quotes symbol. I use the keyboard " for all quotes, where your posts have a distinct beginning and ending quote. I believe the neutral quotation mark is defined as U+0022. Your quotes are the "Left Double Quotation Mark" U+201C and the "Right Double Quotation Mark" U+201D.
I see Verdana is your first font choice in the CSS; I have that installed on my machine and it has the proper quotation marks in the font.
When in doubt, blame Unicode implementation.
Thanks, Dean, that's good info. Now to figure out what I did to change this from last month (when it displayed properly) to this one.
Only noticed problems in passages copied from other sources, which happens routinely on lots of blogs.