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On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 1:35 AM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Paul Hartman |
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> <paul.hartman+gentoo@×××××.com> wrote: |
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>> After a bit of Googling, it seems the accepted solution is to use HTML |
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>> entities for those symbols and not try to use the raw characters as |
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>> you are attempting to do. |
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>> |
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>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references |
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>> |
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>> Does that contain all of the symbols you need? If there are any |
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>> others, you should be able to use the unicode versions. |
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> |
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> Sigh. My stuff is not for a mass audience. I can expect them to |
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> install a font, |
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> and I'd really not like to be fooling with entities that much -- composition is |
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> laborious. It's really annoying to me to have a font on my own system that |
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> is inacessable through browser features that were apparently designed to |
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> allow just that. |
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|
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I just tested it locally (on a Windows XP machine). Using this HTML syntax: |
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|
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<span style="font-family:Symbol">The quick brown fox</span> |
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|
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It shows up the way you want when using Internet Explorer, Chrome and |
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Konqueror, but not in Firefox, Opera, Safari or Seamonkey. |
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|
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Based on everything I can find on Google, it seems like using a font |
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in the way you'd like just doesn't work most of the time. From what I |
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understand, it is because the web long ago moved to Unicode; the |
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browser is "smart" enough to know that you don't /really/ want to use |
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the Symbol font (even though you tell it you want to use it). In other |
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words, the Symbol font knows what those glyphs actually represent, and |
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the browser is doing the "right" thing by showing the latin text "the |
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quick brown fox" rather than turning it into Symbols that do not |
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represent the letters in "the quick brown fox". |
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|
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> And Unicode is a complete mystery to me. I see stuff come in and display |
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> as it should, but as an author it's just something I've never used. How do |
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> you compose such stuff on a standard US-English keyboard and system? |
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|
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What editor do you use? What format is your main document? I'm |
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assuming HTML is not the primary format. You could also perhaps export |
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to PDF instead of HTML. |
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|
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Typically your editor would be Unicode compliant and would either |
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allow you to insert characters via some kind of character map |
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application, or use some kind of a keyboard shortcut to type the |
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unicode number of the glyph you're trying to insert. For example, in |
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Microsoft Word you can type the 4 digit unicode hex ID and then press |
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Alt-X and it'll replace it with the actual Unicode character. |
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|
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To bring it back around to the topic of Gentoo, I think if you are |
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using a 2007.0 profile or newer then Unicode support is enabled by |
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default. |
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|
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As far as using Unicode in HTML, it's not much different from using |
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the named entities -- you can use numbered unicode entities as well. |
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For example: & #xAFE2; (no space between the ampersand and the # -- i |
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put it there in case your e-mail client tried to interpret it). |
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However, if you are using a unicode encoding then you won't need to |
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use the entities, you can just have the raw Unicode characters in your |
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file. |
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|
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The following website has all(?) of the Unicode glyphs and their HTML |
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equivalents, as well as showing you how they render in your web |
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browser: http://theorem.ca/~mvcorks/code/charsets/auto.html |
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|
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> I'll do what I have to do, but only when I'm convinced it's the best |
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> alternative. |
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|
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Good luck :) |
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|
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Paul |