January 5, 2009

What’s with the Squares?

Filed under: Main — Tags: — admin @ 12:01 am


You’ve probably seen them, puzzled over them or perhaps just let them go. They infect web pages galore, but you can find them in chat rooms or anywhere you may encounter computers from overseas. They’re the mystery squares. Let me explain what’s going on.

What you see when you encounter a square, or a diamond with a question mark in it, is a font issue. Basically, your computer lacks the proper character to display. To make up for the missing character, a square block is put in its place.

The purpose of the square block is simply to tell you that a character is missing. After all, a blank wouldn’t tell you anything. A square block, on the other hand, might confuse you — unless you know that it’s tell you about something that isn’t there. For example:

您好吗?

The above text is in Chinese. It says “Hello.” That text consists of three Chinese characters, plus a question mark. If your PC lacks the ability to display Chinese characters, then you’ll see three little squares instead. Seeing the squares is pretty common as many PC users don’t bother to install the Chinese character set fonts. (In fact, you don’t need them — unless you plan on reading a lot of Chinese!)

Other foreign languages have similar issues on most PCs. Even the Macintosh, which supports a wide swath of languages, has trouble displaying some south asian character sets. No biggie though, as long as you know why the squares are there. Now you do.

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