[Blennos]

whats with the fonts?

This has been going on for several days now. I can find no fix on my end. The crazy symbols show up in every browser I've tried, in every operating system. It must be something on the FR server. It does make browsing articles a little more challenging.

[mason-dixon]

I don't have reference handy... just working off memory as a computer programmer 20 years ago.

ASCII is the code used to transmit text (see Martian movie for details). Initially this was 7 bits long and supported the regular (Latin) alphabet, numbers, common symbols. But with the need to support more languages/alphabets and more symbols (for example the e for Euro currency), the ASCII-256 was defined for 8 bits long (256 different characters). In 2007, ASCII was further extended by defining UTF-8, which includes ASCII as a subset and can be up to 32 bits long.

Maybe there's a setting in the FR server that needs to be switched from ASCII-256 to UTF to handle the special characters and foreign characters now being sent and displayed on our browsers as garbage.