Why do I sometimes see squares such as this  when reading bulletin
boards or newsgroups or the occasional online newspaper? It appears
that they should be single or double quotes, but they just appear as
little squares. I am running Win98 and IE6, and would like to fix this
problem if possible. If that's not possible, then an explanation for
this phenomenon would be good enough.

Hi! Thanks for the very interesting question.

It seems that we are dealing with character support for your browser
in this question. The help file for Microsoft Word 2000, which, I used
as initial launch pad for this research, and a supporting document in
the Internet, talks about two issues:

1. Texts in a foreign language may not display correctly so that you
must install IE’s Multilanguage Support Pack.

2. Fonts that are installed in your computer may not be able to
display a certain texts for that language.

In the article “A tutorial on character code issues” in the web
meanwhile have this to say about your problem.

“In addition to the fact that the appearance of a character may vary,
it is quite possible that some program fails to display a character at
all. Perhaps the program cannot interpret a particular way in which
the character is presented. The reason might simply be that some
program-specific way had been used to denote the character and a
different program is in use now. (This happens quite often even if
"the same" program is used; for example, Internet Explorer version 4.0
is able to recognize α as denoting the Greek letter alpha (á)
but IE 3.0 is not and displays the notation literally.) And naturally
it often occurs that a program does not recognize the basic character
encoding of the data, either because it was not properly informed
about the encoding according to which the data should be interpreted
or because it has not been programmed to handle the particular
encoding in use.”

“But even if a program recognizes some data as denoting a character,
it may well be unable to display it since it lacks a glyph for it.
Often it will help if the user manually checks the font settings,
perhaps manually trying to find a rich enough font. (Advanced programs
could be expected to do this automatically and even to pick up glyphs
from different fonts, but such expectations are mostly unrealistic at
present.) But it's quite possible that no such font can be found. As
an important detail, the possibility of seeing e.g. Greek characters
on some Windows systems depends on whether "internationalization
support" has been installed. “

“A well-design program will in some appropriate way indicate its
inability to display a character. For example, a small rectangular
box, the size of a character, could be used to indicate that there is
a character which was recognized but cannot be displayed. Some
programs use a question mark, but this is risky - how is the reader
expected to distinguish such usage from the real "?" character? “

To read the whole tutorial please follow this link:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html#control 

The following are articles you may try to fix the problem:

http://webmail.lshtm.ac.uk/com/novell/webaccess/help/en/0201.htm 
http://www.virginia.edu/~asmedia/TTSP/foreign_language_encoding.html#configuring_your_browser

Search terms used:
Unsupported character display issues

I hope this would help you in your search. Thanks for being a part of
Google Answers.

Regards,
Easterangel-ga

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Clarification of Answer by easterangel-ga on 25 May 2002 07:09 PDT

Hi again.

In addition if you want to read Japanese and Chinese Email messages
the IE website has this tip.
http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q257213

Hope you would find this useful.

I guess I should have specified that I DON'T visit non-English sites,
therefore this rare problem only occurs on English websites (in my
experiences). I must say I would have been happy to get a response in
a week, but an hour or two is phenomenal. Better than most of my
software vendors!

Just an interesting observation: The "square" in the question doesn't
show up on my screen as a square, but as a lower-case "a" with a grave
accent.

And for me, the square appears as expected, but the "alpha" displays
as an 'a' with an acute accent...

Unfortunately, there is not presently a single international standard
for interpreting character codes, something which is long overdue! As
a result, there is presently no way to know for sure what character
should be displayed for each code in a source text. Most source
material does not come with an attached "code book," and, often, the
best that you (or your display or printer software) can do is to pick
a standard based on the likely software and country of origin, and
even that doesn't work very well, since there are often critical
variations from font to font installed in the same software. You can
try adjusting your browser options (View->encoding->... in Internet
Explorer) to match the likely encoding for the page you are viewing.
Maybe someday soon, we'll straighten out the mess, and we'll get
another step closer to true WYSIWYG display that works around the
globe.

Hiya, i think the problem you are describing is because the text for
the newsgroups or online newspaper has been written using MS Word,
this symbol is the Paragraph character that appears at the beggining &
end of every new paragraph, this character is supported by Truetype
Fonts however it is not supported by MIME Text which is what the
newsgroups posts are. as for the person that reports that when he
views the web page it appears as "a lower-case "a" with a grave
accent" this is because he has set the default codepage subset as
Latin Extended-A, where as most other PC's Will not, as it is set to
Basic Latin as default, both the paragraph Character and the a with
grave accent share the same codepage dependant on which subset your
computer is set to as default. I hope this answers your question. as i
heve been asked this very same question by somebody else a few months
ago