Re: [gentoo-user] Browsers not seeing symbol font

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo@×××××.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@×××××.com> wrote:
>> I have discovered that the symbol font does not render reliably in
>> browsers.  Only one of my audience (of about a dozen people) could see
>> the font properly, in a variety of browsers.  The one who could is
>> using Firefox, and I have not been able to determine what makes this
>> one special -- I do not have access to that machine to check out
>> configurations.
>>
>> I have a very simple HTML example at
>> http://www.kosmanor.com/~kevin/symbol.html.  By rights it should show
>> "The quick brown fox" transliterated into greek letters.  On most
>> browsers set up for English, it seems to come out in latin letters,
>> but there are no latin letter in that font, although these same
>> browsers honor requests for a variety of other fonts.  This is true
>> even on some machines that definitely have the symbol font, and it's
>> usable in word processing documents.
>>
>> Of course, that sample page is ancient HTML, but the problem first
>> surfaced in HTML email being received on a much more sophisticated
>> page by Yahoo Mail.
>>
>> There's a lot I don't know about character encodings, i18n and the
>> rest, but this still seems discrimination against the symbol font.
>> Any clues out there?
>
> 1. "Symbol" is not a defined CSS font family. Your choices are: serif,
> sans-serif, cursive, fantasy, monospace.

I've changed the CSS to use the font-family property which accepts
actual fonts in addition to the generics you mention.  No joy.

> 2. Character encodings are easy: use Unicode. :)
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/symbols.html

Yes they're easy.  My question is about whether they have any effect
on use of Symbol  So far I see no evidence of it.

> 3. Because neither your HTML nor your HTTP headers declare which
> character encoding the page uses, it is left up to the browser to make
> that decision (which obviously causes unpredictable results). You
> should really define this.

My browser default is Latin-1.  The original YahooMail page specified
us-ascii.  No difference.

> 4. Similarly, check the character encoding setting on the browser to
> make sure it's not forcing it to be wrong. Firefox also has options to
> allow or disallow the page from using its own fonts, etc.

My browser is set to allow this. No joy.

> 5. Make sure the requisite fonts exist on the viewer's computer and is
> properly installed.

It works in MS Works, Dreamweaver and on Gentoo, in OpenOffice.
>



-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD