What does it mean that the text in the control looks like all the squares?

Question

I have a control that displays text, but somehow the text looks like all the squares, why?

PS This is an edit control in winform, and the source text is in Japanese.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Try going to a Japanese site, copy the Japanese text and paste it into this text box.
If it shows squares, the problem may be with the font of the text box.

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

Answer 2

This is probably due to the lack of a Unicode character set. Check out the wikipedia page for details on installing updates.

Answer 3

This means that the font does not contain the characters you want to display. In this case, these blocks are displayed as placeholders.

The most common reason for this:

• Invalid string encoding.
• Display Unicode characters without the correct font.