Scheiss

My character map has stopped working. The frame comes up but there are
no characters in it. Can I do anything about this?

On 8/25/2019 7:21 AM, Martin Edwards wrote:
My character map has stopped working.Â* The frame comes up but there are
no characters in it.Â* Can I do anything about this?

It came back on. I think it was thrown out by a tussle with the
Guardian site. Does that site annoy others as much as it does me?

Martin Edwards wrote:

Martin Edwards wrote:

My character map has stopped working.* The frame comes up but there
are no characters in it.* Can I do anything about this?

It came back on. I think it was thrown out by a tussle with the
Guardian site. Does that site annoy others as much as it does me?

I can't see how your web browser affects the behavior of the Charmap
app. You did not state you were trying to use Charmap to input
characters into some web form presented in a web page in a web browser.
Also, web browsers will download fonts that don't exist on your computer
(unless you configure them to disable webfont downloading, like you
don't want the web font foundaries, like Google, tracking your web
surfing). Disabling webfont downloading also means some sites won't
appear correctly. For example, my pharmacy using webfonts for using
their graphical symbols for button labels; however, without the
webfonts, a placeholder gets displayed for the button's label, so you
don't know what the button does.

https://collinmbarrett.com/block-web-fonts/

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/0...-your-website/
"when a font is requested by the user's browser, their IP is logged by
Google and used for analytics". Applies to any 3rd party font foundary
used to deliver the web font, including Monofont.

https://www.monotype.com/legal/priva...rivacy-policy/

A site that hosts themself the web font does not have the font foundary
tracking your surfing. However, the reason why sites use font
foundaries to deliver fonts is to offload that bandwidth from their
server the font foundary's server. Same reason they use CDN (Content
Delivery Network) providers for some or all of the content of their web
pages.

You never mentioned which web browser you were using, or how it is
configured for enabling/disabling web font downloading.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/t...chrome.184198/

While disabling web font downloading is easy to configure in Firefox,
Google provides no user-configurable option to promote privacy by
disabling web font downloading, or if allowed by 1st party (the site you
visit) versus 3rd party (the font foundary's server). Using a command
line switch is futile since it only applies when you load Chrome using a
shortcut where you can specify the command line to load it or you
manually enter the command string into the Run dialog or a command
shell. When calling it by clicking on a hyperlink, like for a URL in an
e-mail, the command line switches don't get used. As typical with
Chrome, you have to install an extension to give access to a
configuration setting in Chrome that Google chose not to expose.

Have you ever before loaded the Charmap app so it can cache up all the
fonts on your system? How many fonts do you have? Go into the Control
Panel (as the Settings - Fonts app won't give you a count), and select
Appearance and Personalization and select Fonts. There is a count at
the bottom of all your fonts (by family which can consist of variations
of a font, like regular, bold, italic, bold+italic, black/heavy stroke,
etc), so there are more fonts than the count shown.

Some fonts won't appear in Charmap's drop-down list of fonts. Some
fonts use the "font linking" model (aka "composite fonts") to create a
single font that combines script-style fonts. The OS and even apps can
specify fallback fonts: if a font doesn't exist on your computer, a
substitute gets used.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/glo...ont-technology

Font substitution can also be used by an app to replace a requested font
(using its PANOSE info) to select another font that is available and
similar.

It is possible your font cache got corrupted and has to be rebuilt from
scratch. See:

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/rebui...che-in-windows

VanguardLH wrote:

I can't see how your web browser affects the behavior of the Charmap
app.

I would hope that a tab crashing in firefox didn't affect [in a minor
way] the calculator app on my Win10 machine, but it does, I suspect if
calculator was not a UWP app, it wouldn't.

"Andy Burns" wrote

| I would hope that a tab crashing in firefox didn't affect [in a minor
| way] the calculator app on my Win10 machine, but it does, I suspect if
| calculator was not a UWP app, it wouldn't.

That's an interesting bit of trivia that I didn't know. But
I guess it makes sense. The Metro-esque apps are
essentially HTAs, from what I've been able to figure.

V makes a good point about shutting off font downloads,
though. They're not necessary and they've been used in
the past as an attack venue. They also provide a way for
Google to track you. It's become a fad for webmasters to
link to Google fonts. (Not all do, but many do.) What do you
lose by blocking download fonts? The occasional custom
font and silly character icons. The latter is the main purpose.
It's easy enough to use a decent, readable font on webpages
without custom downloads. People tend to use the download
fonts to get silly custom icons and logos.

In Firefox, disable these:

gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled
gfx.font_rendering.graphite.enabled

I also add this to my HOSTS file:

fonts.googleapis.com