Some font characters show up as boxes with numbers and letters inside of them

Question

Here is an image of what it looks like: http://i.imgur.com/u5VQowA.png

The top text is from Firefox, and the bottom one is from Mousepad (Liberation Mono 10).

Xubuntu 12.04.

There is a similar question to this one, altough no answer is given how to fix it.

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OK, I found the solution. I installed a package called fonts-tibetan-machine and now it works.

Thanks to "Jukka K. Korpela" for directing me to this site.

So if you want to raise your dongers properly on Ubuntu, make sure you have fonts-tibetan-machine installed.

Solution

The boxes contain the hexadecimal Unicode numbers, and they are a common (and recommended) way of indicating that there is a character that cannot be rendered, because it is not present in the font(s) being used. So this is a font problem.

In situations like this, it is often useful to check font information at Fileformat.info. In this case, font support to U+0F3C (one of the characters of the case) appears to be rather limited. In closer look, using other sources to check for additional fonts, the situation appears to be that the following fonts contain it:

• Arial Unicode MS, a proprietary product shipped with Microsoft Office, also purchaseable separately.
• GNU Unifont, free, but a coarse bitmap font.
• Jomolhari, a free font for Tibetan.
• Windows Himalaya, proprietary, shipped with Windows Vista and newer.
• SunExt-A, a large font of Chinese origin, mentioned to be free.

To see the characters in an editor, you would need to install one of the fonts containing it and instruct the editor to use it, via the editor’s font settings or otherwise.

To use them on a web page, you could declare a font-family list that mentions all of those fonts, in preference order. But this would only work for users that have at least one of them installed. To get wider coverage, you would need to use one of the fonts as a downloadable font (web font) via @font-face, see my Guide to using special characters in HTML.