Text encoding is broken in published sites

Classic
1

Hi,

I’m not sure when it broke, but the text encoding on my published site no longer works. I don’t think I’ve updated any stacks, but I’ve upgraded to the latest RW Classic (9.6.3)

The problem is site wide on published site. The encoding looks correct in RW and when previewing on localhost. This page demonstrates the problem:

The “Japanese Translation Section” lost the asian-language transition. On other pages, “smart quotes” are mangled and unicode characters are lost.

This is a snapshot of the live site:

Screenshot 2025-09-10 at 12.40.35 PM
Screenshot 2025-09-10 at 12.40.35 PM2051×515 155 KB

And this is what it looks like locally:

Screenshot 2025-09-10 at 12.52.52 PM
Screenshot 2025-09-10 at 12.52.52 PM2045×476 132 KB

Could this be a recent RW bug? Perhaps a stack incompatibility?

I’m happy to provide more info to track the problem down. The site is based on Blueball Responsive Stack (discontinued) and I’m using the Markdown stacks which are part of Stacks. I’ve tested the Markdown stacks that come with Foundry 3 and Foundation 6 as well, and the encoding is broken there, too. I’m not a web developer (which is why I’m using RW) so I’m not sure where to look for the problem.

Thanks,
John

Edits:

  • I replaced the page link; it now directs to a simple test page.
  • I corrected the theme framework I’m using
2

are you already on macos thao26? if so, with which browser?

3

Hi, No. macOS 15.6.1; Safari 18.6 and iOS 18.6.2. I don’t think it’s a browser problem, I have several RW site and they’re still displaying text encodings correctly.

4

This is normally the case if the font is not awailable correctly on the server. As it runs Ok on preview:

  • Can you do a “republish all” and see if this fixes the issue?
  • I see the browser uses the fallback system fonts here

Next steps:

  • Use locally hosted fonts and not the online Google fonts
5

Thanks, I can check the fonts, I think I’m using HelveticaNeue by default (macOS font) and not loading anything other than FontAwesome from Google.

I still have an older version of the site up from July; the text-encoding was correct then: Custom Bezel Screws for Classic G-Shocks

Edit: Forgot to mention: Republish All didn’t resolve the issue.

6

Then please add

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

To the .htaccess file and see if this helps

2 Likes
7

It’s a font problem, as the font loaded doesn’t support Japanese characters -OR- the wrong character set is loaded.

See if @Fuellemann’s tip helps to force a default character set. If not, try a different font.

Cheers,
Erwin

1 Like
8

Thank you! Adding that to the .htaccess file fixed it. Not sure what broke, though, as it was working up until July, but now I have a solution.

1 Like