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

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

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 1:35 AM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Paul Hartman
> <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
>> After a bit of Googling, it seems the accepted solution is to use HTML
>> entities for those symbols and not try to use the raw characters as
>> you are attempting to do.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references
>>
>> Does that contain all of the symbols you need? If there are any
>> others, you should be able to use the unicode versions.
>
> Sigh.  My stuff is not for a mass audience.  I can expect them to
> install a font,
> and I'd really not like to be fooling with entities that much -- composition is
> laborious.  It's really annoying to me to have a font on my own system that
> is inacessable through browser features that were apparently designed to
> allow just that.

I just tested it locally (on a Windows XP machine). Using this HTML syntax:

<span style="font-family:Symbol">The quick brown fox</span>

It shows up the way you want when using Internet Explorer, Chrome and
Konqueror, but not in Firefox, Opera, Safari or Seamonkey.

Based on everything I can find on Google, it seems like using a font
in the way you'd like just doesn't work most of the time. From what I
understand, it is because the web long ago moved to Unicode; the
browser is "smart" enough to know that you don't /really/ want to use
the Symbol font (even though you tell it you want to use it). In other
words, the Symbol font knows what those glyphs actually represent, and
the browser is doing the "right" thing by showing the latin text "the
quick brown fox" rather than turning it into Symbols that do not
represent the letters in "the quick brown fox".

> And Unicode is a complete mystery to me.  I see stuff come in and display
> as it should, but as an author it's just something I've never used.  How do
> you compose such stuff on a standard US-English keyboard and system?

What editor do you use? What format is your main document? I'm
assuming HTML is not the primary format. You could also perhaps export
to PDF instead of HTML.

Typically your editor would be Unicode compliant and would either
allow you to insert characters via some kind of character map
application, or use some kind of a keyboard shortcut to type the
unicode number of the glyph you're trying to insert. For example, in
Microsoft Word you can type the 4 digit unicode hex ID and then press
Alt-X and it'll replace it with the actual Unicode character.

To bring it back around to the topic of Gentoo, I think if you are
using a 2007.0 profile or newer then Unicode support is enabled by
default.

As far as using Unicode in HTML, it's not much different from using
the named entities -- you can use numbered unicode entities as well.
For example: & #xAFE2; (no space between the ampersand and the # -- i
put it there in case your e-mail client tried to interpret it).
However, if you are using a unicode encoding then you won't need to
use the entities, you can just have the raw Unicode characters in your
file.

The following website has all(?) of the Unicode glyphs and their HTML
equivalents, as well as showing you how they render in your web
browser: http://theorem.ca/~mvcorks/code/charsets/auto.html

> I'll do what I have to do, but only when I'm convinced it's the best
> alternative.

Good luck :)

Paul