Hacker News Reader

This page is being rendered as DejaVu Sans Mono on my Debian Firefox. This font apparently does not have the Form Feed character [1], so I am getting a bunch of nonrendered characters, once before every * heading (but not before ).

Incidentally, my emacs font face is also the same, so I am also getting a bunch of ^L in emacs C-h n.

[1] https://unicode-table.com/en/000C/

View on HN

Is Form Feed ever a character that a font renders? It’s whitespace, after all. And (hard to be certain on the phone) this “website” is likely just a text file. Maybe Firefox just does not like form feed in general.

That emacs displays form feeds as the Control character ^L (which it is) is also normal, and if you just curled the file confirms that it’s just a plain old text file.

You're correct: FF is not a printable character. But I'm seeing the same issue with Firefox on Windows (with some monospace font). I suspect that the issue is what Firefox complains about in the developer console: The file does not have a defined encoding. In fact, the Content-Type header is completely missing. I guess that those replacement glyphs are just Firefox playing it safe in the face of uncertainty regarding the character encoding.

I use the page-break-lines package to show these a bit more nicely (IMO).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com