Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

How to make Firefox display Chinese characters completely?

more options

This issue is going on for a few months already. At some point my Firefox lost the ability to display some Chinese characters. This is a big issue for me, because I use Chinese almost daily. They're not rarely used characters either. One examples is (you'll be able to see it, I am not): "问" (Now I see only two quotation marks but I know that there is a character in between them.)

Here are the details of what's going on:

When I enter Chinese characters on most websites (not all of them!), only some of them will be displayed, while others are invisible. Thus when I enter a whole phrase, it's difficult to check whether I made any mistakes. I know the characters are there, because I can move my cursor through the characters and it'll stay at the same place, internally counting that invisible character, when I move over one of those invisibles. Also when I write Chinese text messages, the other person never seems to be missing any characters from my messages. Also when I copy paste them into an editor, they're clearly there and visible.

So what I've tried so far is only the following:

I went to: about:preferences#content and then set a font, which I know can display the characters (WenQuanYi Micro Hei). Also I enabled the checkbox with the label "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above".

So either almost aaaaall of the websites I am using suddenly removed their own font choices (highly unlikely) and FF can't use the font set by me properly, or there is another issue at work here.

I also tried with another profile, by starting FF using the command line: firefox -P A completely new profile, no addons installed or anything, but still some Chinese characters are missing.

Information about my machine: OS: Xubuntu 14.04 Firefox Version: 44.0.2 (shouldn't really matter as this is going on for a long time now) (Any other information required?)

Example for a website on which FF is displaying Chinese characters correctly: http://www.mdbg.net

This issue is going on for a few months already. At some point my Firefox lost the ability to display some Chinese characters. This is a big issue for me, because I use Chinese almost daily. They're not rarely used characters either. One examples is (you'll be able to see it, I am not): "问" (Now I see only two quotation marks but I know that there is a character in between them.) Here are the details of what's going on: When I enter Chinese characters on most websites (not all of them!), only some of them will be displayed, while others are invisible. Thus when I enter a whole phrase, it's difficult to check whether I made any mistakes. I know the characters are there, because I can move my cursor through the characters and it'll stay at the same place, internally counting that invisible character, when I move over one of those invisibles. Also when I write Chinese text messages, the other person never seems to be missing any characters from my messages. Also when I copy paste them into an editor, they're clearly there and visible. So what I've tried so far is only the following: I went to: about:preferences#content and then set a font, which I know can display the characters (WenQuanYi Micro Hei). Also I enabled the checkbox with the label "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above". So either almost aaaaall of the websites I am using suddenly removed their own font choices (highly unlikely) and FF can't use the font set by me properly, or there is another issue at work here. I also tried with another profile, by starting FF using the command line: firefox -P A completely new profile, no addons installed or anything, but still some Chinese characters are missing. Information about my machine: OS: Xubuntu 14.04 Firefox Version: 44.0.2 (shouldn't really matter as this is going on for a long time now) (Any other information required?) Example for a website on which FF is displaying Chinese characters correctly: http://www.mdbg.net

ZelphirKaltstahl trɔe

All Replies (2)

more options

Today I started up my other machine, using another OS (Fedora 22, FCITX, LibPinyin). I don't see the same issue.

So I think the question is: What's wrong with the first system?

more options

ZelphirKaltstahl said

Today I started up my other machine, using another OS (Fedora 22, FCITX, LibPinyin). I don't see the same issue. So I think the question is: What's wrong with the first system?

Correction: It's just the opposite situation again, on mdbg.net it doesn't show any characters, but therefore on other websites it does. So I guess on the machine, on which I thought it to be functioning correctly, it's simply that that one config value is set to false again. Checking this now...

Hm that's strange.

Although it is like this:

  • gfx.font_rendering.fontconfig.fontlist.enabled = true

It shows the same behavior as the other system shows, when I set it to false there.

  1. 1
  2. 2