Way to deal with (i guess) unprintable characters

Hi!

I have a problem that could be considered trivial, or esoteric, however I am hoping to discover what the issue is, and maybe even overcome it. If it is just some mistake on the page, then sorry for asking!

Sometimes when I am reading an article online certain letters will be displayed as an inverse colored question mark within a diamond of inverse colored background. More simply put, a white question mark on a black background.

One explanation might be that the font my browser is using does not include that character, for instance, if it is some non-English character. The problem is, I, wanting to experience the full glory of the words in the article would like to see the characters all displayed. Yet I know nothing of html or web page layouts. Is there a way to figure this out? This particular instance is on this web page: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/bathory/women_3.html

This is what I see:

 

It was trying to print out á, but it got messed up when they did it (importing translation error I believe?). I don't think you can do anything on your end, but she has a wikipedia page that's fairly accurate.

 

The text is in ANSI, whereas the page is in UTF-8. It is a common mistake of webmasters to mix encodings. You can "fix" it by choosing ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252 encoding for the page, but other areas of the page might get messed up.

 

Thanks for clearing this up! It was confusing to me because I know there are so many fonts that contain a wide variety of international characters. Well, if adding a new font won't help, it isn't that important. I do sort of wonder about the direction of progress when after all of the advances in technology, a major web site has problems creating text that displays correctly. But I will grant them that most of it does!

Thanks again!

HandsOff!