Can anyone figure out why, only on Yahoo pages, for some reason, I am getting these weird fractions instead of regular characters? I’ve tried changing text encoding and there’s no improvement. Any help much appreciated!
Sorry, I don’t know Safari, but in my limited experience, these kinds of display issues usually come up when you have selected a font set that doesn’t have a wide enough range of available characters to handle the page being displayed. Usually a Helvetica type of font will do, but when worst comes to worst, I have always found Times New Roman has enough characters to handle just about anything.
djm
That’s likely it. Specifically, under the Safari menu go to Preferences, then select Appearance. I bet your standard font here is a funky one. I’d suggest a standard font set to Times 16, and the fixed width font set to Courier 13. If that doesn’t solve it, try a visit to an optometrist.
Jef
Thank you both. The font was set to Arial. I changed it to the fonts you suggested, Jef. Still got the weird display. Very strange.
Thanks again!
I wonder if it might have something to do with your My Yahoo settings then. If you sign out from the Yahoo page, do you still see the funky stuff? How about setting up a new Yahoo user to see if that makes a difference? I’m not sure about the entire Yahoo thing, but if it’s only happening there (and Safari has decent settings) it sounds like the problem might lie in your Yahoo settings.
Good luck, and let us know what you find out! In all likelihood, you just need to consult a ten year old and you could have the whole thing resolved within minutes. 
Jef
I sometimes get question marks or percentage signs instead of the correct character in Safari. I haven’t figured out why, or why it’s only sometimes. And it’s often only on yahoo, but sometimes other sites. I wonder if your problem is in anyway related to mine? If you resolve yours, I guess I’ll try your solution out and see if it helps. Good luck!
Another source of character corruption can be from sites that use non-standard HTML coding for some characters. MS FrontPage used to be especially bad for non-standard MS-isms. Some browsers can’t handle a few of the more obscure character codes, as well. I remember this used to be a big problem with Netscape several years ago.
djm
Download Firefox and see what happens. It’s free, easy and works better than Safari. There is nothing so unique or good in Safari that makes it worth retaining as your primary browser.
Plus, as I discovered last night, you can click the Live Chat button at Chiffy and it actually works. I chatted last night with the gang for the first time in a year. Safari never would load the responses, but freeze instead.
Also, you should run a “repair permissions” utility. Just go to Applications/Utility/Disk utility then click on the repair permissions button. Sounds to me like something is corrupted…
PS. Also, Yahoo just changed over to all new web pages. You mighta happened upon some glitchy painful periods of transition.
Those are indeed strange. I’ve never seen them before.
There’s that, and it also might be that Safari’s browser support doesn’t include depreciated HTML tags, character codes, ect.
I’ve never been big into Netscape; you refering to when they tried to implement their own proprietary web coding?
//edit
Okay, I just jumped over to Yahoo to check things out; I used IE6, IE7 and Firefox and didn’t experience any of the described problems. I’d say it’s your browser.
Take Lance’s advice and switch to Firefox. It’s not perfect, but it’s probably the best one available for the moment.
I had this problem once before. There is something corrupted in the Helvetica fonts or the way they are used or something. I removed all Helvetica fonts and the problem went away. It’s possible there’s a less drastic option than removing all of Helvetica, but that worked for me.
Here’s some documentation about the problem:
http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/garbled_font_fix_helvetica_fractions.html
Thanks everyone. I do have Firefox and haven’t had any problems with it.
Diane, that fix worked the charm–many thanks!
Perhaps not as primary browser, but speed and beauty of display make Safari worth keeping. Firefox is turning into bloatware, is getting pretty slow, and it isn’t exactly pretty.
Bwana! Bwana! Simba, bwana! Simba!!!
djm
It could be worse; you couled be using IE7 
Hey, I use IE7 
… (and I’m a Web Designer, z0mG!!!)
I’d use Opera first.
The best browser is the one you’re most comfortable with.
Ever use Opera on a mobile device (phone, PDA, etc)?
No, I haven’t. Should I?