What does it mean the text in control appear to be all squares?

Question

Hi all,

I have a control displaying text, but somehow the text appear to be all squares, why's that?

P.S It's an edit control in winform and the original text is in Japanese.

Thanks,

Answer 1

It is probably due to a missing unicode character set. Check out the wikipedia page for details of installing updates.

Answer 2

That means the font does not contain the characters you want to display. In that case those blocks are shown as placeholders.

Most common reason for this are:

• Wrong encoding of the string.
• Displaying unicode characters without a proper font.

Answer 3

Try browsing to a Japanese website, copy some Japanese text & paste it into this textbox.
If it shows as squares, the problem could be due to font of the textbox.

Set the font that supports unicode range for Japanese characters (see if Arial Unicode MS helps).