For some reason, only when posting to a Discourse forum, I cannot now include a colon (by typing or pasting on in). I cannot include a colon in the Discourse search bar either (not that this comes up very often). No error message, but any colon included is simply stripped out.
For posts at least, this is a bit of a problem given that colons, just like any other form of punctuation, form an important part of written English expression.
I assume this is a bug? Was it introduced with the latest Beta 10 update? Possibly something to do with Emojis?
You mean you canāt post a colon, like in before a list:
this
:
;
Maybe the emoji autocomplete is confusing you? Can be dismissed by a space, is not invoked when the colon is adjacent to a letter and you can also use a line break afterwards.
I canāt post a colon that looks like the character in the image below.
Hitting space before or after makes no difference (at least in my case), and a typing the colon immediately adjacent to a letter does not make it appear for me either.
*** EDIT - this seems to be a Chrome browser specific issue. In FireFox, the colon character works normally.
Is there anything known about Chrome that would trigger this issue specifically in Discourse web pages, but not in any others?
Hi, I can neither paste in nor type in a colon into Discourse, using Chrome on Windows 10 PC. Using Chrome from my Android phone, or from another browser on my PC, no problem. The issue persists using Chrome incognito mode on PC.
All Extensions gone - : but issue persists. What is odd is that this same browser will accept a colon in any other web page that is not a Discourse web page - so it is specific to Discourse as well as to this browser install
Further to this, opening this thread again in Chrome, all the colons I had typed above were not visibleā¦making me wonder if this is a browser fonts issue, specifically exposed by whatever font Discourse uses for this forum theme
You canāt tell how specific it is because, unless you do a lot more testing, you donāt know the scope in any dimension of the current problem. It could affect all Chromium-based web browsers. You probably havenāt tried all characters. Etc.
Testing all (US) keyboard accessible characters, my testing suggests only colon is affected.
From comments above, chrome browsers on other platforms are not affected
I just installed Chrome Edge browser to test, and can confirm it is similarly affected (colons not visible in Discourse, but visible on other web pages)::.
In Chrome now, and typing a bunch of (for me invisible) colons produces ::::::::::::
And it does look like overriding fonts in Devtools font-family temporarily fixes the problem, causing the above colons to appear (this is achieved only by deleting specifically the āHelveticaā font reference, with no issues leaving either or both Arialā and āSans-serifā in place )
Possibly for people who have Helvetica installed as a system font, this breaks something specific to the Discourse-in-Chrome context, but not for other browsers?
EDIT Confirming that uninstalling Helvetica as system font does resolve the problem in Chrome, and Chrome Edge browsers.
Not really a viable workaround, as like many people, I do use Helvetica in CAD and other graphical applications, and my formatting in existing documents will be messed up if another font was substituted.
Searching Google it seems both windows and Mac users are elsewhere reporting similar though not identical problems with Helvetica font in relation to Chrome on some websites.
I mean as a system font.
I found that as soon as I uninstalled the Helvetica system font, Chrome and Chrome-Edge behaved normally when displaying Discourse forums.
Other browsers were fine for me, with or without Helvetica installed as a system font. And other web pages under Chrome or Chrome-Edge were fine for me even with Helvetica installed as a system font.
