[gentoo-user] Browsers not seeing symbol font
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
... 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
On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Kevin O'Gorman 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
On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 7:15 AM, Albert Hopkins 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
On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Paul Hartman wrote: > On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Kevin O'Gorman 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
On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Kevin O'Gorman 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
On Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:38:31 -0700 "Kevin O'Gorman" 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 signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Browsers not seeing symbol font
On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Paul Hartman wrote: > On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Kevin O'Gorman 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
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 1:35 AM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote: > On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Paul Hartman > 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: The quick brown fox 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
