Bad Quote Glyphs? Think Encoding.

December 09, 2013

If you’re seeing bad glyphs for quotes, ellipses, etc., think “encoding?”

Ever since I started, I’ve been struggling with quotes; single quotes (or “inverted commas”), double quotes, and ellipses kept rendering the wrong glyphs, such as the Euro sign. I wasted a lot of time trying to tell the HTML renderers how to handle these correctly, all the while wondering why I wasn’t seeing everyone complain about it!

It’s simple; I forgot to specify the correct encoding in my templates. Argh! This has bitten me before.

Changing my template header from this…

    <html>
      <head>

…to this…

    <!doctype html>
    <html xml:lang="en" lang="en">
      <head>

fixed the problem.

Yes, the header needs work, but encoding issue, the bane of my existence, is solved!