On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogor...@gmail.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
