firefox/thunderbird doesn't render accented characters

[Tim]

On Sat, 2009-08-29 at 13:02 -0700, Mike Wright wrote:
> Both firefox and thunderbird replace accented text with a 
> black-backgrounded question mark.  If I wget these files the
> characters display correctly.

Have you changed the font you're using to render pages?  The question
mark just indicates that it couldn't display the character, not why.
There's various reasons (misidentified character set, font doesn't have
a glyph for that character, etc.).  But, usually, if it's a case of the
wrong encoding, you'll see wrong characters rather than question marks.
Generally, they'll show up because the page is fine, but you don't have
a font capable of showing the character.

You haven't said whether the problem occurs with all texts using
non-ASCII characters, or just some.

> If I save them from either of the mozilla apps the files are saved
> with the replaced characters instead of the originals. View source on
> firefox is useless because even the source is mangled

It seems that Firefox, just about always, translates incoming data to
the local character set.  What's your locale set to?  (Type the command
"locale" into a terminal.)

> with thunderbird I can see replacements such as these: =A0, =B9, =E6. 
> Just in case those get mangled they are "equal-sign capital A zero", 
> "equal-sign capital B nine", "equal-sign capital E six".

That's quoted-printable encoding.  Mail using it can get mangled by some
servers, but I don't recall seeing that happen on here.  If it's not
mangled, just present in the source code for some messages, but not in
the normal message display, then that's indicative that the messages are
fine and you have a font rendering problem.  If they're showing up in
the normal message display, then that's a mangled message.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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