[gentoo-user] Browsers not seeing symbol font

[gentoo-user] Browsers not seeing symbol font

[Kevin O'Gorman]

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?

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD

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

[Albert Hopkins]

... not sure what this really has to do with Gentoo specifically, but...

Anyway I don't have a font called "Symbol" or any font alias called
"Symbol".  I do, however, have a font called "Wingdings", for example.

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

[Paul Hartman]

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.

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

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 7:15 AM, Albert Hopkins <marduk@letterboxes.org> wrote:
> ... not sure what this really has to do with Gentoo specifically, but...
>
> Anyway I don't have a font called "Symbol" or any font alias called
> "Symbol".  I do, however, have a font called "Wingdings", for example.

The situation is the same on systems that DO have a Symbol font,
including my Windows Vista.  I changed the page to use font-family and
included my Gentoo box's OpenSymbol.  No joy.


-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD

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@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

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

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

[Paul Hartman]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Paul Hartman
>> 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.

You're right.

>> 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.

Okay, now I realize "Symbol" is the name of a specific font. I hadn't
really picked up on that before :)

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.

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

[Mike Kazantsev]

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On Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:38:31 -0700
"Kevin O'Gorman" <kogorman@gmail.com> wrote:

>> 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.

They shouldn't, since such fonts' glyphs aren't aligned with any
encoding afaik - it'd be rubbish, at best.


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

Well, it also works for me, if I change 'Symbol' to 'Luxi Mono', for
example, which is a valid font name on my system.

Since handling of such stuff as font-family is defined by browser, it's
at best unwise to rely on 'Symbol' font definition, and, while IE6 is
still around, even more so.

You can use any decent font-rendering library to make
browser-independent representation of such stuff, which is probably the
only solution if you care whether end-user can see it or not.

-- 
Mike Kazantsev // fraggod.net

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

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> 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.
>
> Okay, now I realize "Symbol" is the name of a specific font. I hadn't
> really picked up on that before :)
>
> 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.

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?

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

++ kevin

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD

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

[Paul Hartman]

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

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

[»Q«]

On Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:35:41 -0700
"Kevin O'Gorman" <kogorman@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.
> 
> 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?
> 
> I'll do what I have to do, but only when I'm convinced it's the best
> alternative.

An easier alternative (IMO) would be to serve the pages with
charset="UTF-8" and compose them as Unicode pages.  This way you can
just use the raw UTF-8 characters without having to look up entity
names.  Example: <http://remarqs.net/misc/pi.htm>.  To do it that way,
you'll need to edit the pages with a UTF-8-capable editor and save
them with that encoding, natch.

The issue you were up against, trying to use a font specification to
change one character into another one, just won't work with html.  When
a browser encounters a character, it should first check to see if it
can use the specified font(s) to render it;  if it can't be rendered
using the specified font(s), the browser must look for a font that
contains a glyph for the character and use that font instead.

In the case where the the specified font is Symbol, there's no glyph
for a 'p' in that font, so the browser must use some other font
whenever it encounters a 'p'.  What it must *not* do is change a 'p' to
a 'π'.

IE has always been broken in this way, and the old Netscape browsers
were as well.  At the start of the Mozilla project, they did away with
this bug.  IIRC, before Firefox 3, there was a hackaround to
re-introduce the bug by editing some Firefox files, but it's no
longer possible to trick Firefox into substituting one character for
another.  (I don't believe WebKit/KHTML browsers or Opera can be tricked
into it either, but I'm not sure.)

-- 
»Q«
     Kleeneness is next to Gödelness.