Help : Google Typed Hindi True Fonts not Showing

[purnenduchauhan]

Friends,

Just upgraded my Forum from SMF 2 RC2 to SMF RC3.

Ran some maintenance modes.

Now I am facing the problem of Display of True Fonts of Hindi.

Have a look
http://younguttarakhand.com/community/index.php
Suggest a remedy asap as half of my board contain these fonts.

[purnenduchauhan]

No reply so far   
I am getting perplexed ....

[Norv]

Hello there!

And sorry for the delay.
Please, make first a backup copy of your Settings.php from the forum directory, to be sure.
Then, open your file in a code editor, and add to it before the last line: (on some line before the ?>)

Code Select Expand


$db_character_set = 'utf8';


Save it and upload it back online.

Please, let us know how it goes.

[purnenduchauhan]

The line was already there.

However I added it but no changes. 

[Norv]

Can you please login in phpmyadmin, choose your database, then select the smf_messages table (you might have a different prefix than "smf_", but the messages table), and the "Structure" tab, and make a screenshot of it?
Of the Structure tab, no other.

Please attach that screenshot here.

[purnenduchauhan]

Please have a look and suggest remedy.

[purnenduchauhan]

No reply so far.

My board is doommmmmmmed............ 

[Norv]

Sorry for the delay... Can you please tell, if you look at the message body in phpmyadmin, how do you see the characters?
For example, if you select the messages table, and the tab "browse", then look at the body column, do its contents appear correctly?

[purnenduchauhan]

No the content do not appear correctly.

Now what to do

[Norv]

When you look at phpmyadmin page, at your database, can you please tell what is the character set it is encoded in: right click the page, and "view source" - you may find something like

Code Select Expand


    content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />


What is the charset for your phpmyadmin page?

[purnenduchauhan]

Here it is

Code Select Expand

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
    content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
<script type="text/javascript">


[Norv]

1. Do you have a backup of your files from before the upgrade? If yes, could you please check it out and PM me the contents of your Settings.php file? (please feel free to edit out the passwords and such, but leave all the rest in place)

2. Could you eventually remove completely the line:

Code Select Expand


$db_character_set = 'utf8';

from your Settings.php file, upload the changed file, then refresh the forum? How do characters appear, when the line isn't there AT ALL ?

[purnenduchauhan]

Just removed this line and everything became normal.....

Thanks A LOADSSSS.

But still I would like to know what exactly has happened.

[Norv]

I'm afraid your database tables (their rows) have actually a different character set than the data in them. I don't know how this happened, but it is very dangerous: you risk losing data. It seems that for now, it was just a problem of displaying the characters - okay, but it could become worse: data can be corrupted. (well not by SMF normal behavior, to my knowledge - not in RC4 - but I can't guarantee for anything else).

Maybe it would be good to ask your host if they changed something, did they change default character sets of the database? Did they converted the database or tried to? Did you perhaps?
Did you happen to have a mod keeping history of posts revisions?

Whatever it was, the database should be set to the correct charset and collation, to be safe in the future...