I am running Linux/Gnome/Firefox

Here is a screen shot of my view of frame 1235 on the website. The character has a "mouth" where the book has an "elbow".

http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~nwatkins/Screenshot.png

Is this an error?

- Noah

It seems to be an error in your kanji font, rather than on the website. It displays correctly [with the elbow] here[winxp, ff3]

Ow, that is an weird elbow. Everything is ok here too, I mean, I get the elbow.

I think that is the (possibly Simplified) Chinese version of the character. The trouble is that this site's HTML says its language is "en-us", ie English. So when the browser sees a kanji it has to pick a font, and there's nothing to tell it explicitly whether this is Chinese or Japanese. Pango (the Linux font engine Firefox uses) tends to prefer Chinese fonts to Japanese ones (when run in a non-Japanese locale, anyway).

You can tell the font engine to prefer Japanese over Chinese with an environment variable:

Code:

# Tell Pango what fonts to prefer: English first (otherwise
# we use a Japanese font for Latin text, which usually looks
# awful) then Japanese (so kanji don't end up in a Chinese
# font). Specific language information should override this
# so actual Chinese will probably still come out correctly.
export PANGO_LANGUAGE='en;ja'

That needs to go in a suitable startup file so it is seen by all programs started from the window/session manager; or there might even be some kind of GUI widget for specifying environment variables. Consult your local Gnome guru -- I'm afraid I don't use Gnome.

(Fixing the website so it tells the browser explicitly it's Japanese is on Fabrice's todo list.)

Oh, the bad news is that if you've got as far as frame 1235 with a Chinese font then others of the kanji you've been looking at so far will also be subtly different. I hope you've been looking at the book's characters too :-)

try the change font greasemonkey script and get rid of mincho at the same time!

I wonder if the owner of the site could simple add
lang="ja" to the element with the kanji. this seems to work on Linux
in a couple tests.

nwatkins Wrote:I wonder if the owner of the site could simple add
lang="ja" to the element with the kanji. this seems to work on Linux
in a couple tests.

Like I said, it's on his todo list (I reported the bug a little while back). You'll want to get Firefox to prefer Japanese fonts anyway, as this isn't the only site with this issue (http://www.google.co.jp/ did at one point, for example, and may still.)

Anyone know a solution for Opera on Linux? It has the same issue.I'm pretty sure that Opera doesn't use pango but I tried the environment variable anyway ; it didn't work.
Opera supports userjs(greasemonky) and usercss so if you have any ideas, let me know.