Img Title Attribute Displaying Blocks Instead Of Foreign Characters

A few of the images on my website have a title attribute containing foreign characters. These characters display correctly on the rest of the website, and in the HTML source, but a

Solution 1:

This issue tends to mean that the character set you are using is not installed on the client computer.

If this is a Unicode encoding, it is possible that the character range is not installed on the client computer (in order to save space, many Windows installation only include a subset of the fonts, normally excluding far east fonts and those less used in the west).

Solution 2:

The rendering of title attribute values is browser-dependent and normally uses a specific font, which is settable by the user (though extremely few users know about this) and naturally varies by browser and platform. In some modern settings, browsers are able to use different fonts here, but on older systems, you get something different, quite possibly often boxes indicating characters not present in the font. There is nothing you can do about this as an author, when using the title attribute.

The morale is that nothing essential (if anything) should be communicated in title attributes.

Solution 3:

Based on the answer by @oded I found that changing the QuickInfo font in Windows XP from Tahoma to Lucida Sans Unicode traded in the ugly boxes for the actual unicode characters I wanted to see.