Unsolved Parts of webpages render in gibberish
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Lately I've noticed that some parts of some web pages—not all sites, and not all language on a page on that site—renders as gibberish.
I think it's because I changed the default fonts in Vivaldi's settings, but even trying to change them back hasn't helped.
Here's an example of what I mean from the Time Timer website (but I've also seen it on Wikipedia articles):
How do I fix this?
I'm running 6.6.3271.48 (Stable channel) (arm64) on macOS Sonoma 14.3.1 -
@thesweet Default fonts are rarely the problem, because most websites load their own third party fonts. Try it on a fresh profile for a sanity check. But if you want a guess—it’s maybe an extension messing with it; either blocking third party fonts, or changing up something else. The text that doesn’t compute for you is set in italic. You will have to troubleshoot this yourself. Next time provide links…
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I tried it with all my extensions turned off just to check, and that didn't help.
Here's a link to the page: https://www.timetimer.com/products/time-timer-desktop-app-mac-or-windows-free?ls=O6R2VRpiQPio9WHuKU7pAgThey have a Page Assist plugin of sorts installed, and when I toggle the font to Sans-Serif, it becomes readable.
I will try a fresh profile to see if that helps.
ETA: The issue persists in a Guest Profile and in a New Profile. -
@thesweet The picture you shared shows a sans‐serif font, I don’t know what switching would accomplish. Someone else on macOS should test this.
I did another check, the page doesn’t seem to load a font for the body, it only loads font awesome for icons. Check which fonts you have installed, Helvetica Neue is preferred, then it prefers Helvetica, then Arial and then the default sans-serif font defined in Vivaldi settings. Maybe you don’t have an italic version of the font in use, but I don’t know why it would display wrong characters then. It is indeed strange. I’m the worst person to test this anyway, because I have a system wide font substitution for all Helvetica fonts which changes it to IBM Plex Sans…
You should have Helvetica Neue installed on macOS by default. It includes an italic version. What your issue with Wikipedia is is curious in this context too, because it defines sans-serif as default without any fallbacks, which should use the font you have defined in Vivaldi settings. So it makes no sense you got issues on both pages.
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@thesweet
For me, that page does not work at all. It is mostly blank, and keeps reloading every half second or so. -
Works, but has different text. They must serve different content based on location.
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That would be my guess...
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As I previously mentioned, I noticed it on Wikipedia pages, too. Here's the latest one I've seen it on, but again, only where italicized text should be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roam
What's weird is that if I copy and paste the "gibberish" text, it renders fine, e.g. "For other uses, see Roam (disambiguation)." but for me, that shows up as Lux"uznkx"{yky2"Xugs".joygshom{gzout/4 with "Xugs" to "gzout/" equivalent to the actual link "Roam (disambiguation)".
I tried changing the sans-serif font back to Helvetica Neue to see if that would help, and it hasn't. Incognito doesn't help, or disabling all my extensions, or using a fresh profile. Could the font itself be messed up somehow? This doesn't happen in other browsers though (tried Safari, Firefox, DuckDuckGo, and Edge).
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Only the references are in italics on the Wikipedia page, but they look normal to me. Maybe you have an extension causing the problem?
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more and more sites I visit are unreadable
I attach a site and how I see it
Site:
https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/
how I see it:
This happens on more an more site, plantuml was the latest one I have this problem with
The odd thing is, I was at the plantuml page, it looked normal,
I entered the editor page on it, then pressed return, and since then, the page is unreadableAlso, if I copy and past the text, it is normal, or when I enter the reader view.
I have this behavior only in Vivaldi, all other browsers do not have that issue.
This is serious
I am obviously not the only one with this problem
see: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/95962/parts-of-webpages-render-in-gibberish?_=1710670383658It makes Vivaldi unusable, please investigate
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This seems to be a bug, I have a similar problem, reported here with more info:
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/96157/webpages-render-in-gibberish-bug -
I just noticed that MS Edge has the same strange behaviour , pages work in Safari
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@a4z Either your font is broken, or it’s an encoding issue. This is not a Vivaldi bug, if it happens on other Chromium browsers too.
This is the only issue on Chromium I could find, which apparently introduces “mangled” characters on macOS ☛ https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40134263. Seems to be the same thing basically, with the difference the reporter experiences it when about to print text.
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ok, but why does it work with Safari or Firefox?
how could I fix this if it's a font or encoding problem? -
Ok , I changed the default font from Times to Times New Roman, now the text is shown normal again
strange, what could have messed up the Times font, and how could that be repaired?
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@a4z I don’t know, but there are far more macOS users on Chrome than on Vivaldi. Do some investigating, maybe it is dependent on operating system version and the included fonts. It’s telling the problem doesn’t occur for Windows and Linux users.
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I would love to have the time to dig into the problem, but I do not spend Sunday evenings on the Computer because I am bored. I need to get work done.
And since it works now, I will probably soon forget about the problem, I guess. -
My default font was Helvetica Neue, and changing it to Times New Roman didn't help. If it's a Chromium issue, but the linked Chromium report you mentioned hasn't had much in the way of updates, is this a Chromium issue or a macOS issue? It seems to have been going on for several years, so it doesn't seem to be tied to specific OS versions (I'm on macOS Sonoma, 14.4), and I confirmed that all the fonts listed in Vivaldi are activated.
Additionally, I don't have this problem on Edge or Chrome, so if it's a Chromium issue, how could it be impacting some of the browsers, but not others?
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Anyone have any thoughts on this? I have confirmed a few times now that it doesn't happen with the latest versions of Chrome or Edge on macOS, but it does in a Vivaldi Private Window.
What could it be about italic text that is doing this? Is the way it's being rendered significant somehow?
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I've been having this same problem as well since the latest update. For me it could be even more extensive than italic text alone. On some pages, such as this one, the entire body of that article is gibberish.
As with the others, disabled extensions (using a private window) made no difference, nor did turning off Vivaldi's ad and tracker blocking for the site.
I also noticed Reader mode works correctly, and that selecting the gibberish text and copying and pasting it does reveal that the underlying text is correct. It's purely a display error.
Changing my default font settings did not fix it. What did work was opening up the developer inspector and adding a global CSS rule to the live page rendering:
body { font-family: "Helvetica Neue" !important; }Obviously that's not a permanent solution (though it could be if you use an extension like Stylus), but it does at least hint at the nature of the problem. Something about fallback fonts doesn't seem to be working correctly.
I've gone with the Stylus workaround for now, hopefully that helps someone else out, for whom changing the Default Fonts settings does not work, as it did not for me.
- After installing the extension, click on its icon in the toolbar, and then the Manage button.
- In the sidebar, click the "Write new style" button.
- Give it a name, like "Fix gibberish", at the top of the sidebar.
- On the right side, make sure the scope drop-down is set to "Everything".
- Copy and paste the example CSS provided above into the text editor.
- Click the Save button back in the sidebar.
My suggestion would be to leave it off by default, and only turn it on when you encounter a page with unreadable text. Overriding every bit of text with one font on the whole site is a bit brute force for most uses, and may mess up button icons that use font hacks. To toggle it, click the Stylus icon in the toolbar and change the state of the checkbox. Easy.
