[yugyug]

Hi, since running the 10.4.4 os x update some japanese fonts don't display correctly in Safari, which is pretty annoying as i'm based in japan! Its the same in Firefox too. Its not all japanese websites, just some. Can anybody help or even just point me in the right direction for fixing it??

[B Gallagher]

Can you give us some idea of which specific websites are doing this? What exactly do you mean by not displaying correctly?

[yugyug]

this is one website I know was displaying correcty in safari before the upgrade

http://higedura.cool.ne.jp/

I see the japanese writing now as

"‹›“Ë‚«�EƒXƒsƒAƒtƒBƒbƒVƒ“ƒO� ���‡ƒTƒCƒg�AMOGULER'S DELIGHT‚ɂ悤‚±‚»�I
ŠC‚Å‘fö‚è‚ð‚µ�Aƒ„ƒX‚Å‹� ��‚ð“Ë‚¢‚Ä•ß‚è�A‚»‚ê‚ð� �H—¿‚É‚µ‚Ä"

for example

any ideas?

[JKT]

The server is sending the wrong text encoding information for the page - try switching the encoding for that page to Japanese (Shift JIS) and it will display correctly. To do this, open the page, go to the View>Text Encoding menu and choose the desired encoding (it may work with the other Japanese encoding types too... don't know anything about any of them to say what is what).

[yugyug]

thanks JKT i didn't know about that and it works.

but I'm still curious as to why the page displayed correctly before I updated to 10.4.4 - is there like an auto-detection function in safari/mac osx that could have been changed?

or is the question really : am I going crazy?

[B Gallagher]

I just had a look at the coding of the page. It's pretty bad. There's no meta data to specity which encoding the page is in. This will have a lot to do with why it's showing up incorrectly. This seems to be a big problem with a lot of Japanese pages. Even those that do bother to put encoding details tend to use Shift-JIS rather than UTF-8.

Go to Safari > Preferences > Apperance > and change Default Encoding to Japanese (Shift-JIS), and it, and other pages should display correctly from now on.

[yugyug]

cool. My hypothesis now then, to fullty get to the bottom of it, is this:

The install disks for tiger were bought in Japan, so the initial install of safari that came with had shft JIS as the default encoding. The 10.4.4 update, being done by software update, didn't know I was in Japan and changed back the default to whatever it is in the states or something.

[osiris]

I think there's a problem with 10.4.4 and Safari; setting the encoding to Shift-JIS does nothing, apparently, as it doesn't stick, unlike pre 10.4.4.

This sucks and is quite annoying to have to manually re-re-apply the encoding for each web page. Even the text above is jarbled, unless manually set.

[osiris]

*bump*

Problem persists in 10.4.5

[Macanoid]

what fontmanager are you using? Plus, have you tried cleaning your font-caches, repairing permissions and restarting.

[osiris]

Originally Posted by Macanoid

what fontmanager are you using? Plus, have you tried cleaning your font-caches, repairing permissions and restarting.

Thanks for the tips.
I performed all of the above, many times. What's interesting is that Camino renders fonts perfectly, but Safari is quite poor. And this problem does not appear with other programs, only Safari with 10.4.4/5. I've sent a bug report to Apple (for whatever that's worth )

I've used FontBook once or twice some time ago, but haven't touched it since. Just to make sure, I checked for damaged fonts, duplicates, etc. Nothing bad found. Strange... and all this started with 10.4.4.

[Macanoid]

I had similar problems, what I did was removing all fonts (except the ones in the System folder!!!) and have FontAgentPro re-import and check every font I have and manage everything from there on. After that and after re-starting I only had about 16 fonts active initially. Solved all my problems. A similar procedure might work when using FontBook.

Another option might be opening FontBook and see if any font names have black dots. If that's the case, those fonts are activated double.

[osiris]

All my fonts check out okay + every program I've tried (Quark/Photoshop/Mail/Camino/TextEdit etc..) display all fonts correctly and obey my system wide text encodings.
So obviously the problem is with Safari, so I'll try reinstalling it.
It's the weirdest thing.

Thanks again for your help!