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(solved) I am seeing symbols instead of some text on the internet

Tags:
  • Windows XP
  • text
  • characters
  • Internet
  • Font
  • Display
Last response: in Windows XP
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September 4, 2014 2:32:08 AM

I am seeing some text on the internet as symbols and I cannot read it. I believe this is because I am still using Windows XP and it doesn't have the correct fonts to display the text. I tried researching, but I don't know what to search to find an answer.

Each symbol looks like a square with 4 letters and/or numbers in it. Here's part of a screenshot from Steam's website. I cannot read the tabs or the name of the forum I am in.

More about : solved symbols text internet

September 4, 2014 2:40:43 AM

Does this happen on other websites?
What browser are you using?
If using Internet Explorer, Microsoft stopped maintaining the version for Windows XP long ago.
Download Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
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September 4, 2014 2:49:24 AM

It's probably the site not declaring the character encoding correctly and the browser auto-selecting one that is different from the actual encoding used. Still pretty common, even though declaring character encoding has been a thing for at least half a decade, if not longer.
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September 4, 2014 2:51:23 AM

I am using firefox, but I think I figured it out already. I got to this page on steam through a google search. I just did the search again and google asked if I want to translate the page. After I noticed that I looked in the url and it says "L=korean" on the end. So it was displaying the site in Korean and I can't display that. I changed the url to "L-english" and it fixed it.

What confused me was that every other page I went to on steam, some of text looked like this. Mostly just the text inside of buttons or tabs, the rest was normal. I thought they may have updated the site to a new font that XP doesn't recognise. Because I was logged in and that one page told steam I wanted to see the site in Korean, it locked all future pages on steams website to Korean and I couldn't read anything.
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September 4, 2014 2:51:54 AM

The problem has been solved. Thanks for your help.
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