Little boxes instead of letters in browser

On some web pages, my browser displays little square boxes instead of showing some characters. The boxes are the same size as a letter. In FF 3.0.1 there are four tiny letters in the box, while in IE 7.0.5703 the box is empty (and sometimes IE just leaves the space blank rather than rendering anything).

This only shows up on a small percentage of the pages I view.

I've tried playing with various character encoding options in FF, but nothing totally fixes the problem. Some character encodings replace every character with little boxes, but usually the problem is just a few chars. Today it showed up on a Wall St. Journal news page and the bad chars seemed to be outline numbering or bullet points rather than text. Yesterday the problem appeared to be displaying some apostrophes (others worked fine).

I'm guessing I'm missing some fonts or the like, but, if so, how to find or install the relevant fonts is not at all clear to me.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

I just tried the Wall St. Journal news page, try the encoding Western (ISO-8859-1).

For the other pages, can you post the link? This way I can tell you what encoding(s) are missing.

 

This WSJ page in the "Benefits for McCain" portion. FF's page info lists it as UTF-8. It does not work properly with that or with Western (ISO-8859-1).

http://blogs.wsj.com/politicalperceptions/

See attached.

 

Are you talking about those 4 boxes on the left? Cause I'm seeing the same in FF3, and in IE7, I'm seeing an empty box instead. The UTF-8 is the correct encoding for this page, to me it seems like it's their error using some rare bullet points.

 

^ Yeah, +1. Same page, same boxes, same encoding..