This is a trifle nuissance of a distraction, but I gotta ask the question because the incidences of this just keep increasing. It began, to the best of my recollection, shortly after rollover, and was a laughable ironic glitch, especially in light of all the earlier rumoring about the Chinese @ Panama and in the Bahamas. The problem continues though, on all the terminals at the library where I log on: many web pages come up on screen with standard text of Roman characters in the typeface, but sporadically and without rhyme or reason, some Chinese characters are substituted for English ones.

It used to be that characters from non-English alphabets were the only ones affected -- like the umlauted "u" in German or the tilde over "n" in Spanish, or accents in French or Celtic names. Then it extended to apostrophes and possesive forms of standard names. Now -- it can be any letter -- a "D", and M" -- anything, any letter, is likely to appear as a CHinese character ..... Explanations, please?

TNX

>"<

-- Squirrel Hunter (nuts@upina.cellrelaytower), April 03, 2000

Answers

SH:

Kind of hard to diagnose at a distance but what you're describing are the typical symptoms of a TrueType font file that's corrupted. Windows will start to pull characters from other TT files if it finds a corrupted entry in the default file. You should ask the library people to delete and reload the TT file that's used as the default for IE or Netscape, depending on which they use.

Of course, it could all be some sort of Chinese plot.....:^)

-- Jim Cooke (JJCooke@yahoo.com), April 03, 2000.