In preparation for the upcoming election on Tuesday, I’ve been reading several articles on cleveland.com (the website for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the area’s main newspaper). In all of the articles, I’ve been noticing the same two peculiar misspellings: First, every instance of the lower-case letter x is replaced with an opening-double-quote character. Second, every instance of the lower-case letter y is simply omitted entirely. So you get things like “It’s time for the ne"t step for William Yeung, who is now running for maor”
What could possibly cause these typos? My first thought was OCR errors, in something scanned in, but these are current news articles. Surely, nothing modern is scanned and OCRed; it’s just typed directly into a computer. And OCR errors are seldom that consistent, either.
Some issue with text encoding, maybe? Or with font representation? But I wouldn’t expect either of those to happen with characters as basic as English-language letters.
Or maybe it’s something with my browser? Is this showing up for anyone else?
A sample story (though the same two issues seemed to consistently show up in every story I read):
The current version of your sample article contains neither of those anomalies that I could find. I’m on Win10 & Edge.
The keyboard I’m typing on has a defective “o” key and although I strike it, it often doesn’t register. e.g. I just had to go back and put the “o” into “keybard”. Perhaps whoever typed your offending articles has a bad “y” key & they don’t spell check very well.
Lowercase x in UTF-8 or ASCII is hex 78 (U+0078) while straight double-quote is hex 22 (U+0022) and opening double-quote is U+201C. I’m not seeing any kind of single-bit error or encoding glitch that should be able to make one into the other.
When I copy and paste a chunk of the body text into Word, it tells me the font is Palatino Linotype.
Try opening Word or Wordpad on your PC and typing a sentence or 5 in that font. See if it replicates the error. If so, your font file is messed up. (Assuming I’m following this correctly)
If so, you can probably delete it from the windows font folder and replace with a copy from another windows machine.
It might be interesting to copy/paste a paragraph containing examples of the goofed up text into whatever word processor you use and see what font it thinks the good and bad characters are. If there is a way to install a fresh copy of those font(s) on your machine you’ll probably have miraculous healing.
In displays and Word etc., if you paste something and the font is not found, AFAIK it will find and use the nearest matching font (serif, bold or not, size, etc.) I’m not current on web tech, and especially Mac (my newest Mac is 10 years old) so I can’t say if the possibilty is that (a) it’s downloading the font along with the web page (and we don’t see the error, so the font itself is fine) (b) and possibly there was a glitch when it downloaded and the font is persistent in your browser cache.
The fact that this particular website (and as far as we can tell, onnly this site) is doing this on only your computer suggests to me that might(!) be an issue. A lot of newspapers like to maintain a consistent “look” by using specific “custom” fonts.
The way to check this, is to clear your browser cache. However, I hate doing this if it risks erasing cookies, since then all your things like saved login preferences get deleted. But if you’re brave, and careful what you agree to delete when clearing browsing history… that might do it.
Another suggestion is to start Firefox in Troubleshoot mode - see if it’s the same…
How to start Firefox in Troubleshoot Mode
Click the menu button
click Help, select Troubleshoot Mode…
and click Restart in the Restart Firefox in Troubleshoot Mode? dialog.
If you (any you) are using a browser that doesn’t support clearing cached data and cookies on a site-by-site basis, it might be useful to consider upgrading to one from the last decade or so. Progress is a real thing.
But yeah. Your overall point is spot on. Something is wrong with the cached data or fonts associated with that one website on that one computer. Forcing a refresh of that is the most likely cure.
Well, going for the low-hanging fruit, opening the page in private browsing mode didn’t change anything. At this point, though, I think my next step is the one @Riemann suggested: