Comments on: Firefox displays weird characters as headings (solution)

By: InF

InF — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 15:47:51 +0000

Thanks for the contribution!

By: djn

djn — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:43:21 +0000

Hi all. Found this page googling about the same problem. Installing Helvetica didn’t help, but uninstalling and old Geneva v. 1.0 did the trick!

By: InF

InF — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:27:31 +0000

@Thaoh: Interesting solution. Will try that if the problem returns…

By: THaoh

THaoh — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 20:49:56 +0000

It appears that Firefox relies on some registry entries in windows that tell it which fonts are available. Sometimes the fonts once were available, so it attempts to run the file. This is remedied by erasing said registry entry.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts\Helvetica (TrueType)

Alternatively, if you’re lazy put this in the file fix.reg(select save as all in notepad) and run it:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts]
“Helvetica (TrueType)”=-

By: InF

InF — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:26:35 +0000

@Scaramouche: Interesting! Didn’t find that thread myself, but it contains some good information, specially about the zoom.

You can’t just rename fonts. I think they have some embedded data inside the file, apart from the file name to identify the font.

You could try a font editor and see if it works.

Oh btw, I forgot to specify. Under Windows 7, the problem of garbled character no longer occurs. Someone must have fixed the scaling problem. I don’t know if it’s Win7 or that I’m (still) using FF 3.5.x.