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On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> I have discovered that the symbol font does not render reliably in |
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> browsers. Only one of my audience (of about a dozen people) could see |
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> the font properly, in a variety of browsers. The one who could is |
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> using Firefox, and I have not been able to determine what makes this |
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> one special -- I do not have access to that machine to check out |
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> configurations. |
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> |
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> I have a very simple HTML example at |
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> http://www.kosmanor.com/~kevin/symbol.html. By rights it should show |
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> "The quick brown fox" transliterated into greek letters. On most |
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> browsers set up for English, it seems to come out in latin letters, |
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> but there are no latin letter in that font, although these same |
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> browsers honor requests for a variety of other fonts. This is true |
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> even on some machines that definitely have the symbol font, and it's |
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> usable in word processing documents. |
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> |
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> Of course, that sample page is ancient HTML, but the problem first |
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> surfaced in HTML email being received on a much more sophisticated |
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> page by Yahoo Mail. |
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> |
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> There's a lot I don't know about character encodings, i18n and the |
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> rest, but this still seems discrimination against the symbol font. |
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> Any clues out there? |
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|
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1. "Symbol" is not a defined CSS font family. Your choices are: serif, |
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sans-serif, cursive, fantasy, monospace. |
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|
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2. Character encodings are easy: use Unicode. :) |
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http://www.unicode.org/charts/symbols.html |
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|
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3. Because neither your HTML nor your HTTP headers declare which |
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character encoding the page uses, it is left up to the browser to make |
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that decision (which obviously causes unpredictable results). You |
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should really define this. |
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|
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4. Similarly, check the character encoding setting on the browser to |
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make sure it's not forcing it to be wrong. Firefox also has options to |
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allow or disallow the page from using its own fonts, etc. |
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|
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5. Make sure the requisite fonts exist on the viewer's computer and is |
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properly installed. |
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