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baidu

  • What's Baidu doing with all these crazy characters everywhere?

Seems kind of meaningless to me.

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  • They are either gone by now or they are only showing this decoration to users at selected locations.
    – imrek
    Aug 23, 2015 at 7:37
  • Why the downvote? There is nothing wrong with the question. It does not solve a general problem, but it is related to Chinese, especially the obscure characters, I haven't been able to recognize any of them.
    – imrek
    Aug 23, 2015 at 8:15
  • @DrunkenMaster Yeah, I can't seem to reproduce it actually.
    – Mou某 ♦
    Aug 23, 2015 at 8:23
  • Have you found any of the characters, I only search for the first 人+革, it's not in the Unihan DB.
    – imrek
    Aug 23, 2015 at 8:32
  • 1
    @user3306356 Maybe there was something wrong with the encoding on your computer? Since the only garbled characters in the picture you posted were the three on the top left, it could be they are encoded somewhat differently on the part of the website, and your computer didn’t handle them correctly. Or maybe you’re blocking a script that would otherwise have told your computer which encoding to use on these particular characters.
    – Philipp
    Aug 23, 2015 at 11:11

2 Answers 2

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That's a web development technique, the icon font

What you see is meaningless text. This is actually a web development technique. They are attempting the use a custom designed "font" to display icons instead of the weird characters. However, when the icon font failed to load, your browser then attempts to display the "text" with a fallback font, generally: "Arial", "Times New Roman", "PMingLiU", etc.

So instead of 梜, you should see an chevron to the right. That's because they filled the font with icons.

Here's an example of such font: Font Awesome

Can I use icon fonts to write a passage?

Icon fonts are only meant for graphical displays, not readable font. You cannot type a paragraph with the icon font, they would probably all be icons (for you to decipher ;) ).

Why did they use icon font, why not pictures?

That is because modern font is vector graphical. That means you can scale they up or down and they will not get pixelized. That is great for devices with high quality displays. Also, because loading a font means you can change its color and the pack will still be smaller than an image pack.

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3

Those crazy characters is actually meaningless for native Chinese.

I find baidu use a web technique that use character encoding to simplify their development.

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Through the web tools,I find the icon is used '\e601' for the Bai,and '\e602' for du ,'\e603' for 百科.

So it is not the problem of baidu, maybe caused by some other extensions or softwares. Or maybe your brower do not support the technology.

Suggest you change a browser(NOT IE) to find whether the problem still occured.

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1
  • why not IE? Not defending IE, but IE is one of the mainstream browsers and modern IE supports the technology rather than some Chinese browsers like 酷遊、QQ and such. People uses Chrome most according to statistics and it's better to suggest using Chrome or Firefox on web browsers ;)
    – Daniel Cheung
    Aug 26, 2015 at 13:02

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