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

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@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.

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

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.

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.

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