Ruby on Rails Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The missing glyph character is a feature of many different fonts -- it
means literally, "I don't have any glyph by that name in my table".
The way you "get rid of it" is by providing an encoding and
substitution escapes that convert the wide, wild world of Unicode
typography into something that the more limited browser/OS
combinations can handle.

There are fonts that specialize in having suitably large collections
of characters to print nearly anything besides Klingon. These will
often have the word Unicode in their name. Many, if not most, core Mac
fonts are Unicode-aware, and if you are writing out a CSS font-family
that you mean to cover the most possible characters, you will add the
Microsoft variants of those to your list:

font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans",
Lucida, Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif;

In order for even this font family to work, the user will have to
install a modern version of their operating system, and maybe a modern
browser, and you can't know or control that at all. But you can and
should declare a character encoding through your DOCTYPE and meta
tags, and your server should send a content-type header that includes
a charset attribute. All of these should match the encoding within
your database, and within the other content served by your Web server.
One charset to rule them all!

If your data is stuck in a particular charset, and you can't figure
out how to convert it into UTF-8, then you need to modify everything
-- starting with Rails -- to recognize that the content is in that
encoding, and to treat it as such. Then you also need to specify the
encoding in the generated HTML, so your /layouts/application.html.erb
or local equivalent should have this line in it somewhere:

<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;
charset=YourEncodingHere" />

Walter

On May 31, 2011, at 6:25 PM, daze wrote:

> On May 31, 4:02 pm, Walter Davis <wa...@wdstudio.com> wrote:
>> If the browser is using a typeface (font) that doesn't include the
>> precise character that your page encoding and HTML require, then you
>> won't see that character. The glyph you describe sounds like the
>> "missing glyph" character, and that's why I'm guessing you're
>> seeing it.
>
> But the missing glyph character should be replaced with nothing. In
> fact, if I could do so easily, I would just delete all these "missing
> glyph" characters...
> Is there anything you recommend I do about the missing glyph? I mean
> I don't even see it on my home computer... only on the computers at
> school.
>
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