Ubuntu

question mark � in window titles (Compiz)

Asked by Renardo

I am running Ubuntu 15.10 with daily updates. When the title of a window contains non-ASCII characters they are displayed as "replacement characters" (question mark in diamond, �). I can reproduce this with Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, and LibreOffice. By going to a directory with a non-ASCII sign in its name I can also reproduce it in gnome-terminal.

I suppose Compiz is responsible for displaying window titles. I have checked some settings but found no real clue. Under "Screens" the value for "Scale for menu and title bars" is set to 1; that looks unsuspicious. "Show the menus for a window" is set to "in the title bar" (switching to "in the menu bar" makes menus disappear altogether but that's another thing).

Gnome-tweak-tool shows that the title font is "DejaVu Sans Condensed Bold 11", which contains many non-ASCII characters. I have tried switching to "Liberation Sans Italic"; this causes the non-ASCII character to appear as a box with "FF FD" (the hex code for the replacement character).

I think there must be a way around this, as many languages use non-ASCII characters. Anybody got some helpful ideas?

Thanks in advance.

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actionparsnip
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Best actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

I suggest you report a bug

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Renardo (renardo) said : 		#2

Thank you actionparsnip. I can do that but it looks like I am the only one on the net with this problem (or is it yours, too?). And I just found that it's more complicated than I thought:

* The Swedish word "Öl" displays fine in the title of Firefox (https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96l). Same with "Söndag", so it's not limited to upper case.
* The Hungarian word "Sör" is displayed with a replacement sign instead of the "ö" (https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B6r).

Both pages use UTF-8, and in the HTML source code the letter "ö" is given explicitly, no entities or so. I do not see the crucial difference. Why does nobody else have, or report, the problem?

Fine, I think I'll try filing a bug. But it looks like Ubuntu's developers are under heavy load; I have another bug (with a proposed patch) open for six weeks without any reaction. Thanks anyway.

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Renardo (renardo) said : 		#3

Thanks actionparsnip, that solved my question.