IE and special characters

Question

I have a weird problem with special characters "åäö" and IE 9.

enter image description here

If I turn on compatibility mode it shows the characters in their correct form, however I don't want to force the comp. mode on the user. Why is this always a solution?

This sounds weird indeed. Please provide more information, preferably a minimal HTML document that demonstrates the problem. — Jukka K. Korpela, Oct 31 '12 at 13:14
@JukkaK.Korpela It looks like it had something to do with the characters encoding, even though I specified utf-8 as encoding. I pasted text from a doc. to the file itself in textmate and that whats made everything, however I don't know why this only appears in IE9 and none of the other browsers like: Chrome, FF, Safar... — Philip, Oct 31 '12 at 13:26
can you upload the HTML document and post a URL (if it’s too large to be posted here). — Jukka K. Korpela, Oct 31 '12 at 14:13
thanks, there is definitely something odd going on, though I see the problem differently – äåö all look different from other letters (like raised) in Standards Mode. — Jukka K. Korpela, Oct 31 '12 at 15:16

Jukka K. Korpela · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-31T16:04:09.850

EDITED

This is a tricky issue with many factors, but the most important is probably that the text (at least on the demo page) contains å, ä, ö in two ways: directly as simple characters, and as decomposed. E.g., the “å” of “våld” consists of “a” followed by combining ring above (U+030A). Unifying this so that simple characters are used consistently should fix the issue.

However the demo page also uses font name open-sans instead of open sans, causing further problems, but I suppose this might be a typo in the demo, not on the real page.

Overrides original answer:

This seems to be a problem in the use of the Google font Open Sans. Probably IE uses it differently depending its mode (Quirks vs. Standard), because old versions of IE do not support the WOFF format.

The problem may disappear if you download the font and serve it from your own server. It has often happened that Google fonts don’t work when used from Google server but are OK when you manage them yourself.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 31 '12 at 13:16

0

These are all swedish characters. Probably you should use HTML compatible characters to get rid of problem. Try with this character instead:

&auml;
&aring;
&ouml;

This will show correctly in every browser

answered Oct 31 '12 at 13:16

kidz

308
1
8

with utf-8 this shouldn't be a necessity? – Philip Oct 31 '12 at 13:29
but does it show correctly in this way in IE – kidz Oct 31 '12 at 14:04
That would remove the symptoms, not the problem, and it would be the source very messy. – Jukka K. Korpela Oct 31 '12 at 14:11

IE and special characters

2 Answers2