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The Opera Fonts Problem and other Opera issues.


Dave-H

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I've just noticed a strange effect when running Opera 11.54 on 98SE with KernelEx.

I found it when visiting Nokia's site.

This is how one of the pages looks in XP -

post-84253-0-78017400-1321917045_thumb.j

And this is how it looks in 98SE! -

post-84253-0-21108600-1321917057_thumb.j

I thought the headings were in Greek at first glance, but in places it looks as if it's trying to display English text using the Greek alphabet!

Is this a known problem?

:)

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Is this a known problem?

:)

No such issue here and I guess you mean Opera 11.52 which is the current official release, betas and alphas being 11.60.x and 12.x respectively AFAIK.

Perhaps a missing font and/or some default codepage issue on your system I would guess.

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Is this a known problem?

:)

No such issue here and I guess you mean Opera 11.52 which is the current official release, betas and alphas being 11.60.x and 12.x respectively AFAIK.

Perhaps a missing font and/or some default codepage issue on your system I would guess.

Oops, sorry yes I did mean Opera 11.52!

Thanks for the feedback, good to know it's not like that for everyone, so I will investigate the cause further.

Strange that it should be OK in XP and not in 98.

It's the same installation of Opera, with all the same settings. (It's set up for single user so all the settings are in the Opera folder and its sub-folders, not in user folders.)

:)

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Just a shot in the dark, but check the [FontSubstitutes] section in WIN.INI, see if there's any strange charset there. Also, make sure there's no such strange font substitution (missing font, etc) in Opera's font settings.

Ugh, didn't I promise I'd never say that 'O' word again...?

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Since we are amongst Opera lovers and users, I was wondering guys if you are also unable to drag an url to the desktop with the builds requiring KernelEx to run?

I am not sure this issue has ever been mentioned so I am wondering if it's only happening with me or if it's even a new feature of Opera as I can't test on 2K or XP, using only WinMe exclusively.

Edited by loblo
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Since we are amongst Opera lovers and users, I was wondering guys if you are also unable to drag an url to the desktop with the builds requiring KernelEx to run?

I am not sure this issue has ever been mentioned so I am wondering if it's only happening with me or if it's even a new feature of Opera as I can't test on 2K or XP, using only WinMe exclusively.

Yes I'm unable to drag the url to the desktop with Opera 11.52/51, too. I can drag the url up to version 11.11. (Version 11.50 not tested)

Win ME

I'm able to drag the url with Opera 11.52 on XP.

Edited by schwups
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Just a shot in the dark, but check the [FontSubstitutes] section in WIN.INI, see if there's any strange charset there. Also, make sure there's no such strange font substitution (missing font, etc) in Opera's font settings.

Ugh, didn't I promise I'd never say that 'O' word again...?

There's nothing wrong with the "O" word!

;)

My win.ini Font Substitutes section looks like this -

[FontSubstitutes]

Helv=MS Sans Serif

Tms Rmn=MS Serif

Times=Times New Roman

Helvetica=Arial

MS Shell Dlg=MS Sans Serif

MS Shell Dlg 2=MS Sans Serif

Monotype.com=Andale Mono

Looks OK to me.

Changing the encoding settings on Opera doesn't fix it either.

It is purely a display problem, as if I copy and paste the faulty text into Notepad, it displays in English.

I have found one possibly significant thing though, purely by chance.

The font displayed changes on some text on those Nokia web pages when the pages are zoomed in and out!

At the default zoom, the faulty text displays in what looks like Greek.

At other zoom settings it changes to different fonts, but all using readable Latin characters.

In XP, it always stays the same, which looks like Arial.

Very strange!

This is completely off-topic if it's not something caused by using KernelEx of course, but I would be very interested to know if anyone else can reproduce it.

:)

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Can't see any reason for this issue to be related to KernelEx. My strong belief is that one of your font settings in Opera points to a Symbol or Greek encoding. When font size changes on zoom, the respective font may not support the new size and a replacement kicks in and that's when you see the right Latin characters.

Of course, I may be wrong, but I'm sworn not to ever, ever install that 'thing' again on any of my machines and I'm a man of honor so that's the most I can do. Actually, one other thing just popped to mind: save the webpage(s) to HDD and open it in a different browser (IE, Firefox, K-Meleon, Sea Monkey - whatever you have), see if the bug persists. I'd bet it doesn't. ;)

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@Dave-H:

As you may have read earlier, I successfully installed Opera 11.51/11.52 and have been very pleased with its performance and stability. I'm also running KernelEx 4.5.2 and I went to the Nokia webpage you referenced and didn't have any of your font issues. I also suspect it's an encoding issue but I'm not all that familiar with Opera's technical details (although I'm slowly getting there). I have noticed some differences between Opera and Firefox especially when displaying special symbols/characters, but I never figured out how to make Opera display them (it puts a rectangle in place of the symbol/character). You may want to try the Opera forums for more advice/help. Good luck!

Edited by Prozactive
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Can't see any reason for this issue to be related to KernelEx. My strong belief is that one of your font settings in Opera points to a Symbol or Greek encoding. When font size changes on zoom, the respective font may not support the new size and a replacement kicks in and that's when you see the right Latin characters.

Of course, I may be wrong, but I'm sworn not to ever, ever install that 'thing' again on any of my machines and I'm a man of honor so that's the most I can do. Actually, one other thing just popped to mind: save the webpage(s) to HDD and open it in a different browser (IE, Firefox, K-Meleon, Sea Monkey - whatever you have), see if the bug persists. I'd bet it doesn't. ;)

You're right, it's fine in IE6, at least as far as the fonts go.

It looks a right mess in other ways, but I guess that's because the site doesn't support IE6 any more!

@Dave-H:

As you may have read earlier, I successfully installed Opera 11.51/11.52 and have been very pleased with its performance and stability. I'm also running KernelEx 4.5.2 and I went to the Nokia webpage you referenced and didn't have any of your font issues. I also suspect it's an encoding issue but I'm not all that familiar with Opera's technical details (although I'm slowly getting there). I have noticed some differences between Opera and Firefox especially when displaying special symbols/characters, but I never figured out how to make Opera display them (it puts a rectangle in place of the symbol/character). You may want to try the Opera forums for more advice/help. Good luck!

Thanks, I think I may take it up on the Opera user forum, as it looks pretty certain it's nothing to do with KernelEx.

I still think it's strange that the problem only shows in Windows 98 and not in Windows XP though!

Dave-H, it must be something wrong in your configuration - here is screenshot from my PC (Opera 11.52).

Btw, why Internet Explorer name is visible on the top right?

That's because I have a custom button there to launch the displayed page in IE if it doesn't appear to work properly in Opera! A lot of the time they don't display properly in IE either, but sometimes they do.

:)

Edited by Dave-H
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Forgot to add the reason why I asked you to save the page to HDD: that is, to have a look at the code in Notepad or any text editor and see what fonts, if any, are defined through the document and what is the main page encoding (that's usually at the top and should probably be ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8). It may be that your system is missing a font and the automatic font replacement goes bad.

Also, try to install one or more Unicode fonts (careful, though, as they're usually very large); Arial Unicode MS would be first best choice.

EDIT:

Practice what you preach... Having done that, I stumbled into 00_fonts.css, which opens a whole new can of worms: fonts can be of type eot, woff, ttf or svg, depending on browser type. Enter new variable: User Agent. Did you set Opera to send a different User Agent, such as Firefox, or IE or something else? If not, then maybe css is blocked and doesn't even load, therefore font substitution as set in Options, kicks in.

If css is not blocked, then maybe the woff fonts (never heard of, before) assigned to modern browsers, are not recognized or cannot be loaded.

Edited by Drugwash
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To the Opera users:

Until the devs correct the 12 ALPHA 1155 -- not 1105 --

You can ALWAYS get the 12 ALPHA 1155 to run flawlessly (modulo a very few menu problems) using the old trick that you guys concocted by extracting via 7-zip with option to overwrite files of 10.6x, preferably 10.63.

Dave

PS: The 12 1155 is very, very fast. Even tried it on a dialup connection. May cancel cable if Opera gets any faster. Whadda MuddaHubbard! I'd like to see what an Opera 12 "Slim" version could do.

Edited by dw2108
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Forgot to add the reason why I asked you to save the page to HDD: that is, to have a look at the code in Notepad or any text editor and see what fonts, if any, are defined through the document and what is the main page encoding (that's usually at the top and should probably be ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8). It may be that your system is missing a font and the automatic font replacement goes bad.

Also, try to install one or more Unicode fonts (careful, though, as they're usually very large); Arial Unicode MS would be first best choice.

EDIT:

Practice what you preach... Having done that, I stumbled into 00_fonts.css, which opens a whole new can of worms: fonts can be of type eot, woff, ttf or svg, depending on browser type. Enter new variable: User Agent. Did you set Opera to send a different User Agent, such as Firefox, or IE or something else? If not, then maybe css is blocked and doesn't even load, therefore font substitution as set in Options, kicks in.

If css is not blocked, then maybe the woff fonts (never heard of, before) assigned to modern browsers, are not recognized or cannot be loaded.

Thanks.

I'd actually already seen from the Nokia site's source code that its fonts were defined using a style sheet.

I didn't mention it earlier as I thought it would only muddy the waters.

I hadn't set any Opera site preferences for that site to identify or mask as another browser, but I will try that and see if it cures the problem.

I'm still puzzled as to why it doesn't happen on Windows XP, only on Windows 98, when Opera's settings are identical on both OSs.

Anyway, this is way off topic!

:)

Edited by Dave-H
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Can't see any reason for this issue to be related to KernelEx. My strong belief is that one of your font settings in Opera points to a Symbol or Greek encoding. When font size changes on zoom, the respective font may not support the new size and a replacement kicks in and that's when you see the right Latin characters.

Of course, I may be wrong, but I'm sworn not to ever, ever install that 'thing' again on any of my machines and I'm a man of honor so that's the most I can do. Actually, one other thing just popped to mind: save the webpage(s) to HDD and open it in a different browser (IE, Firefox, K-Meleon, Sea Monkey - whatever you have), see if the bug persists. I'd bet it doesn't. ;)

You're right, it's fine in IE6, at least as far as the fonts go.

It looks a right mess in other ways, but I guess that's because the site doesn't support IE6 any more!

@Dave-H:

As you may have read earlier, I successfully installed Opera 11.51/11.52 and have been very pleased with its performance and stability. I'm also running KernelEx 4.5.2 and I went to the Nokia webpage you referenced and didn't have any of your font issues. I also suspect it's an encoding issue but I'm not all that familiar with Opera's technical details (although I'm slowly getting there). I have noticed some differences between Opera and Firefox especially when displaying special symbols/characters, but I never figured out how to make Opera display them (it puts a rectangle in place of the symbol/character). You may want to try the Opera forums for more advice/help. Good luck!

Thanks, I think I may take it up on the Opera user forum, as it looks pretty certain it's nothing to do with KernelEx.

I still think it's strange that the problem only shows in Windows 98 and not in Windows XP though!

Dave-H, it must be something wrong in your configuration - here is screenshot from my PC (Opera 11.52).

Btw, why Internet Explorer name is visible on the top right?

That's because I have a custom button there to launch the displayed page in IE if it doesn't appear to work properly in Opera! A lot of the time they don't display properly in IE either, but sometimes they do.

:)

I have seen web pages that do the same thing you are talking about but I'm using Firefox.

I don't use Opera but if it has the same options as Firefox, you may be running into a page that has some weird "character encoding" with more than one character set used on the same page.

On Firefox you can manually change the setting under the "View" menu "character encoding" option, Opera should have something similar somewhere.

Most pages use "Western (ISO-8859-1)" or "Unicode (UTF-8)" but there are others.

I think if you can find the option on Opera and change the "character encoding" to a different one (such as "Central European(Windows-1250)" or maybe "Western(Western-1252)", etc. ) when you see the weird characters displayed, Changing to the right character set should fix the text displayed.

Some of the alternate character sets are installed when you install "Multilanguage Support" in the windows "Control Panel", "Add/Remove Programs", "windows setup", "Multilanguage Support".

I think you can also download other code sets from microsofts web site, but since your looking for win98 stuff it will be buried.

Anyway just an idea, hope it helps.

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