[Pidgin] #604: Some characters appear as boxes with numbers in them

[Pidgin]

#604: Some characters appear as boxes with numbers in them
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 Reporter:  PSyMastR              |        Owner:  datallah       
     Type:  defect                |       Status:  new            
Milestone:                        |    Component:  winpidgin (gtk)
  Version:  2.0                   |   Resolution:                 
 Keywords:  font text boxes dice  |  
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Comment(by Calanyo):

 I recently came across this problem but in an unusual way.

 I've never had any problems sending or receiving chinese text until a
 couple of days ago.  I was having trouble reading the chinese because the
 font was so small, so I tried changing the font size.  I did a dumb thing:
 without looking too hard in the preferences, I checked out the FAQ and
 edited the gtkrc-2.0 file.  I managed to increase the font size but
 straight away I was unable to receive chinese characters: only boxes with
 4 circles in them.  This was only the text that was being sent to me:
 everything else was fine, including the buddy names in the chat window.

 Well, that was no good, so I deleted the config file and restarted Pidgin.
 It still did it.  I tried reinstalling: same.  I even uninstalled Pidgin,
 GTK, cleaned out everything in the registry and renamed the .pidgin
 directory in my user account (wanted to keep logs, etc.).  Then rebooted
 before reinstalling everything.  Still no joy!

 I then started mucking about with the preferences and got it to display
 the text in a font that I know supports chinese characters.  That changed
 all the english characters, but any chinese characters were still just
 squares.

 Today, I managed to get it working again by downloading the pango.aliases
 and adding "Times New Roman" = "simsun" to the begining.  I suppose I
 should have tried one at a time, but I didn't want to keep on pestering my
 friend to send me chinese. :)

 (BTW, I didn't even have an etc directory under GTK/2.0)

 Sorry I don't have too many details, but I thought it was so strange that
 I should write something down about it.

 OS/version:  Win XP SP3, Pidgin 2.7.2

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Ticket URL: <http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/604#comment:68>
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