[tlug] Strange encoding problem in FireFox

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Dave M G writes:

Nice job figuring out how to reliably reproduce!

 > Can anyone recognize the pattern of encoding problem in the above 
 > screenshot? Any ideas what might be causing this?

Well, by eyeball it's a linear map of characters with odd ASCII codes
into the JIS X 0201 katakana space.  There are some omissions, such as
"a", "c", and "g", but AFAIC guess there are no even-code characters
getting munged.

Cause, I haven't a clue.  Maybe you've caught a virus ;-) or more
likely some other corruption has occurred in your Firefox installation
(due to plugins, bad disk or bad memory, who knows?)  Most likely,
some of your environment and preferences settings are interacting
badly with plugins and/or Ubuntu mods to Firefox.

Inquiring minds do want to know: What are the values of LC_CTYPE,
LC_ALL, and LANG in Firefox's environment?  Try shutting down Firefox
and then doing "echo $LC_ALL, $LC_CTYPE, and $LANG; firefox &" at the
command line.  If you can get the bug and the earliest of those three
that is specified is not "ja_JP.UTF-8" (which may be spelled slightly
differently, eg no "-" in UTF8), try "LC_ALL= LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8
firefox &" and see if you can get the bug.  If you can't get the bug,
you'll have to figure out how to find out what environment Ubuntu is
handing Firefox and reset it to sanity.  (Hint: `which firefox` is
probably a script, but you may have to dig into your window/session
manager's menus, too.)

What order of languages are specified in Preferences|Advanced|Language
Settings?  When you're looking at the bug, what are the settings in
View|Character Encoding and View|Character Encoding|Automatic
Recognition?  (N.B. YMMV = your menus may vary, this is a free
translation from the nihongo menus I'm looking at.)

What happens if you set the encoding in the View|Character Encoding
menu?