Re: problem with symbol fonts

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Jun 11, 2006, at 2:26 PM, Sascha Heid wrote:
> ...
> http://mathe-online.at/einstellungen/einst.html
>
> If you scroll down you see two white boxes, the right side is a .gif
> and the left side tries to use the symbol-font.
> ...

The reason it doesn't work is that the Symbol font (as distributed by  
Microsoft) doesn't contain the characters the Web page is asking for.  
For example:

    <font face=symbol>
    ó<br>õ
    </font></td><td>
    <font size="-1"><font face=symbol>¥</font></font>

ó is not in the Symbol font, and neither is õ or ¥. So Epiphany -- just  
like Firefox, Opera, and Safari -- substitutes another font that does  
contain those characters.

The page appears to be designed for Internet Explorer, which displays  
characters from the Symbol font because of a bug where Internet  
Explorer ignores what fonts tell it about the characters they cover.  
The same bug occurs with the Webdings and Wingdings fonts.

(By the way, if you're interested in improving the display of  
mathematics in Web pages, it's currently being discussed in the What-WG  
mailing list for possible standardization in HTML 5.  
<http://listserver.dreamhost.com/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2006-June/ 
thread.html>)

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/