Various icons not appearing – square box instead

Hi guys

I have a problem that has come up before, and to be honest I’m not sure how it ever resolved itself. Basically the font-awesome icons, social media icons in the share buttons, and various other theme related icons like the post templates in the theme panel do not appear. In the admin they show as broken, and on the front end they appear as square boxes.

I used the developer tools to check the CSS and I can verify the image paths are correct, and the images are in the directories. I also removed any theme files from the CDN I am using, but no luck…

Anyone else experience this?

I tried that and it didn’t fix things.

It’s strange, because none of the theme icons found in wp-content/plugins/js_composer/assets/vc appear, nor do the font icons on the front end. The images are all in the directory, and the font files are as well.

You might try manually uploading just the font files via FTP to ensure they are in “binary” format vs “ACSII” format — some systems may decompress that stuff incorrectly, or it might get zipped incorrectly, or even uploaded improperly via FTP the first time (some FTP software won’t “auto set” the format type from binary to txt on upload) — sounds stupid, but it’s happened to me.

Worth a try 🙂

And, or course, make sure they are truly being called from your local domain and NOT off the CDN, unless you have CORS rules setup on the CDN.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Thanks for the suggestion Chris, I will try that. The image paths are definitely correct.

I actually downloaded one of the .pngs and tried opening it with Photoshop but get an error message saying “the file format module cannot parse the file”, which is strange.

Perhaps the images are corrupted by my system/antivirus or something of the sort…if and when I figure it out, I’ll update with the solution.

Chris you saved the day. The ascii/binary issue fixed it – many thanks for sharing your drops of intelligence around here.

Ha! People kid me about that one — but it comes up from time to time.

I still use CuteFTP software because it does great job of “auto choosing” the right format if I drag over a folder of stuff when uploading.

The other gotcha is sometimes some files have PC line breaks vs Unix line breaks, and some of the TagDiv files come this way even though I think Radu is using a Mac, which is funny.

Glad I could help!

I’ve been building websites for 20 years as of March … starting to feel like the “old guy” who has to show everybody how to drop that engine into a car properly 😉