I'm running the latest version of Safari - 4.1.3 (4533.19.4) - that's supported by my version of OS X (10.4.11).
For as long as I can remember - at least back as far as the initial release of Safari 4, and possibly back to Safari 3.x, the browser has been incapable of displaying italics correctly on any Wikipedia page on my Mac. Instead, everything in italics displays in what looks like some random character set. Viewing the source code of Wikipedia pages suggests that the problem occurs whenever Safari tries to render the "i" tag.
Each character in italics is legible, but is the wrong character, so that an "e" might be displayed as a "k" for example. It looks like each character has been randomly substituted with a different one, turning everything in italics into gibberish. See this screen grab for an example.
However, when I use Firefox, Wikipedia's italics display just fine (see this screen grab).
Given that this page states that Safari uses the WebKit to render pages, but that Firefox doesn't, the problem appears to be some incompatibility between how Wikipedia codes their pages and the version of the WebKit that's installed on my Mac.
Or perhaps I just have some odd font conflict? A particular version of Arial Italic or similar that's missing, duplicated or corrupt perhaps?
Does anyone have any insights?
Many thanks.
For as long as I can remember - at least back as far as the initial release of Safari 4, and possibly back to Safari 3.x, the browser has been incapable of displaying italics correctly on any Wikipedia page on my Mac. Instead, everything in italics displays in what looks like some random character set. Viewing the source code of Wikipedia pages suggests that the problem occurs whenever Safari tries to render the "i" tag.
Each character in italics is legible, but is the wrong character, so that an "e" might be displayed as a "k" for example. It looks like each character has been randomly substituted with a different one, turning everything in italics into gibberish. See this screen grab for an example.
However, when I use Firefox, Wikipedia's italics display just fine (see this screen grab).
Given that this page states that Safari uses the WebKit to render pages, but that Firefox doesn't, the problem appears to be some incompatibility between how Wikipedia codes their pages and the version of the WebKit that's installed on my Mac.
Or perhaps I just have some odd font conflict? A particular version of Arial Italic or similar that's missing, duplicated or corrupt perhaps?
Does anyone have any insights?
Many thanks.
Last edited: