What does it mean when my text is displayed as Question Marks?

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In Windows there are 2 common display problems that occur when trying to display Unicode characters:

  1. text sometimes appears as question marks

    • This occurs when Unicode data is converted to an 8-bit character set encoding (or technically multi-byte characters) usually via the system codepage (but other code pages can be specified in the conversion calls). If the target 8-bit character set doesn’t include the characters needed, any characters not representable in the target character set get converted to question marks.

  2. text sometimes appears as boxes

    • This is a problem with the font not having the glpyh for a particular character. Boxes show up when there is a mismatch between Unicode characters in the document and those supported by the font. Specifically, the boxes represent characters not supported by the selected font.

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