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

["Kevin O'Gorman" <kogorman@gmail.com>]

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