NationStates Jolt Archive

The regular computer gurus are both on vacation, and I'm having a bit of trouble.

Situation: This is a public terminal running windows.

Someone has done something to Mozilla that I can't figure out, causing pages to come up in an Arabic looking script (might be an Indian - I don't read either).

Explorer and Opera are both working fine. I'm using explorer now.

I tried cutting and pasting an example of the script, but it pasted into this window as English.

I have tried everything I can think of, but to no avail:
I reset both the language and font settings.
I cleared all the cookies and the history.

:(

Anybody have any suggestions?

Go to options in the tools menu. Under General (top button in left hand column), there is an option to set languages. (Third option down).

You can set it to English in there.

The regular computer gurus are both on vacation, and I'm having a bit of trouble.

Situation: This is a public terminal running windows.

Someone has done something to Mozilla that I can't figure out, causing pages to come up in an Arabic looking script (might be an Indian - I don't read either).

Explorer and Opera are both working fine. I'm using explorer now.

I tried cutting and pasting an example of the script, but it pasted into this window as English.

I have tried everything I can think of, but to no avail:
I reset both the language and font settings.
I cleared all the cookies and the history.

:(

Anybody have any suggestions?

Is Firefox set up to connect via a proxy?

Edit-->Preferences-->General-->Connection Settings...

Go to options in the tools menu. Under General (top button in left hand column), there is an option to set languages. (Third option down).

You can set it to English in there.

Thank you, but as I said in the OP, I tried that to no avail.

Is Firefox set up to connect via a proxy?

Nope.

This is "AlphaGeek" (Muntoo's hubby)...

Try this:

type "about:config" in the address bar (don't include the quotes), then hit enter. This should take you to a list of Firefox parameters that you can edit.

Near the address bar (or perhaps at the bottom of the browser window) you should see a find toolbar. If you don't, you can go to the Edit menu and click find in this page... to get the toolbar. In the toolbar, type "lang" without the quotes and Firefox should dynamically filter out the entries that match.

You should see something like "intl.accept_languages" entry on the list that indicates what language Firefox has configured (Muntoo's says en-us,en). I believe this is where you can change it to what you need.

You may need to do some additional "Googling" to figure out what the right settings are in your case though...

Nope.


Is there some kind of relevant Extension installed?

Tools-->Extensions...

(EDIT: perhaps one of the Extensions found here - https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/showlist.php?application=firefox&category=Languages&numpg=10&pageid=1)

Thank you, but as I said in the OP, I tried that to no avail.



Nope.

The only other thing I can think of then, is that it would be the default character encoding, which should be set to: Western ISO-8859-1. (same window as set language).

Did you try that as well when you reset the fonts, or did you reset the fonts in the fonts menu?

If it's not that, then I have no idea.

Dissonant Cognition, no extensions,


Try this:

type "about:config" in the address bar (don't include the quotes), then hit enter. This should take you to a list of Firefox parameters that you can edit.

Near the address bar (or perhaps at the bottom of the browser window) you should see a find toolbar. If you don't, you can go to the Edit menu and click find in this page... to get the toolbar. In the toolbar, type "lang" without the quotes and Firefox should dynamically filter out the entries that match.

You should see something like "intl.accept_languages" entry on the list that indicates what language Firefox has configured (Muntoo's says en-us,en). I believe this is where you can change it to what you need.

You may need to do some additional "Googling" to figure out what the right settings are in your case though...


Got there, hold on....

Nope... that doesn't seem to have worked. :(

Well now he's intrigued...he's looking some stuff up. He might have some info in a couple of minutes.

<AlphaGeek>

Okay -- lets try setting the character encoding as Dougal McKilty suggested:

in the Language settings dialog (Tools/Options/General Tab/Languages button), there should also be a drop-down box labelled "character encoding". Make sure is has "Western (ISO-8859-1)" instead of some Arabic-based encoding.

You can also set this in the about:config screen by changing the font.language.group line to the value "x-western" (no quotes).

Give that a try and see if things clear up...

</AlphaGeek>

Hmmm... it may be deeper than I thought at first...

A few buttons on sites visited with explorer, as well as the search bar (closed when I got on, so I didn't see it until now) are coming up oddly encoded - series of elongated rectangles.

Part of the problem in figuring this out is this machine is running Japanese language windows, so all the menus come up in Japanese. Some I can read, but some need deciphering. The neighboring machine runs English windows,
and I've had to consult the menus there a couple of times. (I'd use it, but it is slower and less stable than this one.) It's being used right now ( and earlier - thus the above delay.)

Anyway thank you all. :)

<AlphaGeek>

Okay -- lets try setting the character encoding as Dougal McKilty suggested:

in the Language settings dialog (Tools/Options/General Tab/Languages button), there should also be a drop-down box labelled "character encoding". Make sure is has "Western (ISO-8859-1)" instead of some Arabic-based encoding.

You can also set this in the about:config screen by changing the font.language.group line to the value "x-western" (no quotes).

Give that a try and see if things clear up...

</AlphaGeek>

Tried both and both are on those settings.

I'm giving up on it for the moment. Exploder's working as well as it ever does, so I'll let the in house gurus work on it when they get home (one of them should be home tonight).

<AlphaGeek>

Perhaps Firefox is grabbing something from the machine's environmental variables to set its regional parameters.

There are a few more character-set configuration options in the about:config page that you can play around with as well. Change your find search to "intl" (without the quotes) to list a bunch of these parameters.

Make sure your intl.charset.default value is set to ISO-8859-1 and not something else. Also, there should be a parameter like intl.fallbackCharsetList.something, where the last item after the period is your default character set (Muntoo's is named intl.fallbackCharsetList.ISO-8859-1). If it is different, that could be the problem.

There are a couple of parameters that actually check the local system for regional settings and make changes to the browser configuration on load. You should be able to prevent this by forcing the browser to only accept the iso-8859-1 encoding in the intl.accept_charsets parameter by removing all but the iso-8859-1 value (remove any commas, wildcards, etc.).

Uh oh, I think I see little stars floating around Muntoo's head right now as she reads this -- her eyes are starting to gloss over as well. :D

</AlphaGeek>

Sorry about the delay, D but good luck with Exploder!

<AlphaGeek>

Perhaps Firefox is grabbing something from the machine's environmental variables to set its regional parameters.

There are a few more character-set configuration options in the about:config page that you can play around with as well. Change your find search to "intl" (without the quotes) to list a bunch of these parameters.

Make sure your intl.charset.default value is set to ISO-8859-1 and not something else. Also, there should be a parameter like intl.fallbackCharsetList.something, where the last item after the period is your default character set (Muntoo's is named intl.fallbackCharsetList.ISO-8859-1). If it is different, that could be the problem.

There are a couple of parameters that actually check the local system for regional settings and make changes to the browser configuration on load. You should be able to prevent this by forcing the browser to only accept the iso-8859-1 encoding in the intl.accept_charsets parameter by removing all but the iso-8859-1 value (remove any commas, wildcards, etc.).

Uh oh, I think I see little stars floating around Muntoo's head right now as she reads this -- her eyes are starting to gloss over as well. :D

</AlphaGeek>

Sorry about the delay, D but good luck with Exploder!


Thank you for your kind help.