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Notepad++ displays boxes instead of chars

Kintak
2009-06-21
2012-11-13
  • Kintak

    Kintak - 2009-06-21

    Hi there,
    I was just introduced to this program not long ago, so forgive me if there's a simple solution to this that I don't know.
    The problem is that Notepad++ refuses to display certain characters, and instead displays boxes. For example, it will replace ╯ with a box. Now, I thought this was a unicode version, so I am a bit confused. Is there something I can do to fix this, or do I just pray to the gods that a patch is made?
    I did read in the FAQ that plugins can cause this, so I tried running Notepad++ without them, but it was to no avail.

    Thanks!

     
    • Rockin

      Rockin - 2009-06-22

      Hi,

      Did you enable UTF-8 formatting? You can do that by going to Format menu>Encode UTF-8 (or if yo want to convert an existing file, choose convert to UTF-8). You may notice there's a "UTF-8 without BOM" option, which I fond I needed with php, otherwise extra characters would appear.

      If you are in fact using UTF-8, then you might be suffering from the same issue I'm having with characters in Windows 7, if you're using this OS.

       
    • Kintak

      Kintak - 2009-06-22

      Yes, I have it set to UTF-8, and I even tried UTF-8 without BOM, but neither is showing those particular characters. Also, I am using Windows XP.
      The thing is that regular Notepad can show these characters, and Notepad++ shows other unicode characters just fine. These particular characters are seemingly random. It's also unable to show ❤, ♡, and ≖ if that helps at all. I don't know what the commonality between all of these is.

       
    • Harry

      Harry - 2009-06-22

      The font Notepad++ users probably does not have these glyphs and displays the boxes. WIndows Notepad uses Lucida Console by default, Notepad++ Courier new. Lucida probably has a larger set of glyphs. Try changing the default font to something else and see if it fixes the issue (Dejavu (Sans mono) is a free font that supports many glyphs, you could try that if you cant find anything that works well).

       
    • Kintak

      Kintak - 2009-06-22

      It worked!
      Thanks a ton.