So I've got a HP laptop I'm trying Ubuntu 11.10 out on with Chromium 17.0.963.65. Complete noob to BOTH (OS and browser), and I'm running into issues here on Skritter, mainly with how characters appear while studying, and also an issue with what I call "echoes" of the writing point.

http://sdrv.ms/AoTQh4

This first one shows how the character(s) look. Definitely not how it looks on my Windows 7 laptop running Chrome.

http://sdrv.ms/x4KFdN

Here you can see the little... I dunno, "echoes" from where my pen has been. When I run back over it, they disappear.

I figure it has something do with either Flash or the font settings in Chromium, but running Ubuntu I don't have any TrueType fonts. So what should I do?

(Please let me know if the links don't work... they should, but it's SkyDrive run through bit.ly, so there may be issues)

The first one is indeed because you don't have the font: http://www.skritter.com/faq#fonts

The second one is Linux Flash being pretty terrible with the drawing. I think it has to do with poor hardware acceleration, but nothing we've tried has been able to turn it off and get back to the functional Linux Skritter rendering of yore. (You would need a really old Flash Player, and I'm not sure that would work any more.) We have many workarounds in place just to get it running at all!

So I don't have any workaround other than to not use 64-bit Linux for Skritter until Adobe issues an update, and it's been months now. 32-bit Linux behaves differently; I forget if it works or not, but it may have other issues. (Not that you want to go 32-bit just for Skritter, either.)

For me, adding ?wmode=opaque to the end of the address greatly ameliorates (but does not entirely eliminate) this problem. So if you are using the stable version of Skritter, it would be http://www.skritter.com/study/all?wmode=opaque

Somewhat related to this, it seemed after casual testing that the most recent update to flash that ubuntu pushed a week or two ago fixed this problem for other browsers (e.g., firefox) that don't have their own built-in flash like chrome. I haven't tested it rigorously and I'm on a windows machine at work though now. Anyone else notice this?

@Nick - OK, I'll give one of those fonts a try... hopefully they'll work on Ubuntu. Just gotta figure out how to do it. ;) Ah, the joys of learning a new OS. However, I AM using 32-bit Linux... my older laptop that it's on is 32-bit architecture, so looks like it still has issues.

@dbkluck - I'll also try your suggestion, see how that works. I switched to Chrome just because FF is so bad with memory leaks (although Chrome sometimes seems to have its own as well... just not as bad as FF). Maybe on Linux, though, I'll have to do FF for now?

Yeah I have exactly the same issue. Have just kind of learnt to ignore it.

OK, so the addition of wmode=opaque has helped with the "echoes", and I'm downloading a new font. But that leads me to my next two questions with this:

1) How do I get Skritter to use that downloaded font through Chromium? Do I need to change one of the font settings in Chromium, or will it simply "work" because the better font is in the system?
2) Should I enable or disable the Wacom plug-in through the Settings cog in the study window, or is that one of those "try it on your system, it might be good, it might be bad" things?

One other "bug" - when it gives me the character and prompts for the pinyin, sometimes it breaks the character into its parts in a rather weird way (radical and primitive). Like right now I'm looking at 皂 and it pulls the bai3 above a little bit, so that the bottom primitive (which I believe should be qi1 for seven/diced) is different... here, this should show it better:

http://sdrv.ms/xgKEYI

I also forgot to mention yesterday that sometimes the grading numbers don't show correctly (although since using the different URL, haven't noticed it as a problem). You can see that here:

http://sdrv.ms/wei6zU

Thanks for all the help so far, guys.

Installing the font is enough. Looks like the font is not being used with the right language for you, though. Is there some way you can indicate language preferences so that (simplified?) Chinese is higher than in priority than maybe Korean or Japanese or whatever it's trying to do?

Wacom plugin will probably not work, although you can try it and see if pressure sensitivity is actually going with it.

Nick, I can do what you said, but the only other language I have listed in that preference setting is English. I can try putting it above English, see if that helps.

Edit: Didn't help. And still seems to do that "split" thing on that one character only, too, which is surprising. At least, haven't noticed it on any other one.

Edit 2: OK, so looking at Chrome/Chromium's font settings, there are four: Standard, Serif, Sans-Serif, and Fixed Width, and then the Encoding choices. That wouldn't seem to be where I fix it, though, because (again) on my Win 7 computer with Chrome, I just have the standard/default fonts chosen there (Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier).

You might just be in for a fun time of seeing variant forms of the characters in the reading and definition prompts, then. Not sure how to get your system to prefer the simplified Chinese style.

Flash doesn't use this same idea, but this kind of variation is what I'm talking about--not a font variation or an encoding variation, but a style-within-font variation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_language_dependent_characters

(Chrome doesn't show the characters as different, but Firefox does, at least on my system.)