Battered type, Richard?

[giner]

I suppose this is a question for Richard, or anyone else with knowledge of these things, but I've recently noticed that in postings on the forum the character 'w', both in lower case and cap, are what used to be known in the old 'hot metal' days of printing as 'battered'; when a character had suffered a bit of damage and therefore wouldn't print cleanly. I didn't know this could happen in the digital world.

I've done my share of lying on an inky press bed between giant rollers replacing battered type with the press crew breathing impatiently down my neck.

These days I obviously have way too much time on my hands, but old proofreaders notice this sort of thing. Anyone have any idea why this is occurring?

[richard]

I think this is much more likely to be a problem on your PC: probably a corrupt font file.
Web pages are only transferred as a list of numbers - with each number representing which character to send (eg. old fashioned ASCII, although these days it is often some variant of unicode). So if a character is being messed up, it is likely to be the font files on the PC which are used to convert these codes into images.

If the page encoding was messed up (this says which code, unicode, utf-8, etc to use) then lots of characters would be messed up. Similarly, if the font specifier in the style sheet is broken it would mess everything up, although possibly for only a few people (this lists 2-3 fonts / font families to try)


Richard

[giner]

Thanks, Richard. I think I got a gist of what you were saying there, but if it were the PC, wouldn't this font problem be evident on all forums, not just this one, and it's only a very recent 'fault' on here. Anyway, it's not a deal breaker for me, it's just something that this old proofreader's eye picked up. Cheers .

[Blink Bonny]

I feel I should remind you of one of J K Rowling's few literary gems:

"Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain."

I never did trust computers, giner...

[giner]

Good 'un, BB.