Help with font symbols

#1

Take a look at this page:

http://tranchant.plus.com/cycling/gears/ratio

Just over half-way down is the sentence 'My wheels are approximately 27?
in diameter'.

I use the ″ double prime for the inches symbol. My site uses the
Trebuchet MS font as a first choice where available.

On my machine, Firefox renders the double prime with no problems, but
Internet Explorer renders it as a square.

Why?

--
Mark.

#2

Mark Tranchant wrote:

Quote:

Take a look at this page:

http://tranchant.plus.com/cycling/gears/ratio

Just over half-way down is the sentence 'My wheels are approximately 27?
in diameter'.

I use the ″ double prime for the inches symbol. My site uses the
Trebuchet MS font as a first choice where available.

On my machine, Firefox renders the double prime with no problems, but
Internet Explorer renders it as a square.

My IE renders it correct though.

--
Els
http://locusmeus.com/
Sonhos vem. Sonhos vão. O resto é imperfeito.
- Renato Russo -

#3

Els wrote:

Quote:

Mark Tranchant wrote:

Take a look at this page:

http://tranchant.plus.com/cycling/gears/ratio

Just over half-way down is the sentence 'My wheels are approximately 27?
in diameter'.

I use the ″ double prime for the inches symbol. My site uses the
Trebuchet MS font as a first choice where available.

On my machine, Firefox renders the double prime with no problems, but
Internet Explorer renders it as a square.

My IE renders it correct though.

Not mine, it renders a square. What version do you have?
I have the 6.0.2800.1106 version :-)

Would the entity for quotation mark be proper to use here, since it's
similar to the symbol for inches?

--
/Arne

#4

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Mark Tranchant wrote:

Quote:

I use the ″ double prime for the inches symbol. My site uses the
Trebuchet MS font as a first choice where available.

On my machine, Firefox renders the double prime with no problems, but
Internet Explorer renders it as a square.

Yup, that figures. I'm assuming that you're talking about Win IE and
thus that you're testing on a Windows platform.

Quote:

Why?

Get yourself copies of the Listfont utility, and of the MS font
properties extension.

Trebuchet MS (at least, the version I'm looking at here - from
experience you should be warned that there could be other font
versions with the same name but having different character repertoires
- this is version 1.15) doesn't contain the prime and double-prime
characters in the Unicode 20xx area.

So you've told IE to use a font that doesn't contain the character;
you have the font, so [various other detailed conditions being
fulfilled] IE uses the font, irrespective that it doesn't contain the
required character. End of story really.

of course Mozilla knows better, and goes and finds the character from
some other font.

More details at
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...ers-fonts.html

There's no good solution for you as author. The best overall results
are achieved by you not specifying any font face, and your IE users
configuring the best-repertoire font which they have. The issues with
IE are all very non-intuitive. Who'd have thought you'd need to
change the font preference for "Latin based" in order to get the
Hebrew to work, to take just one example?

#5

Arne wrote:

Quote:

Els wrote:

Mark Tranchant wrote:

Take a look at this page:

http://tranchant.plus.com/cycling/gears/ratio

Just over half-way down is the sentence 'My wheels are approximately 27?
in diameter'.

I use the ″ double prime for the inches symbol. My site uses the
Trebuchet MS font as a first choice where available.

On my machine, Firefox renders the double prime with no problems, but
Internet Explorer renders it as a square.

My IE renders it correct though.

Not mine, it renders a square. What version do you have?
I have the 6.0.2800.1106 version :-)

Mine is 'the' 6.0.2800.1106xpsp2.030422-1633IS
(dutch version)

Quote:

Would the entity for quotation mark be proper to use here, since it's
similar to the symbol for inches?

No idea if it's proper, but I wouldn't be too worried about
it. :-)

--
Els
http://locusmeus.com/
Sonhos vem. Sonhos vão. O resto é imperfeito.
- Renato Russo -

#6

On Tue, 18 May 2004 11:20:01 +0100, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

Quote:

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Mark Tranchant wrote:

I use the ″ double prime for the inches symbol. My site uses the
Trebuchet MS font as a first choice where available.

On my machine, Firefox renders the double prime with no problems, but
Internet Explorer renders it as a square.

Yup, that figures. I'm assuming that you're talking about Win IE and
thus that you're testing on a Windows platform.

I did a quick test on my XP Pro/IE 6.00.26
and had no problems with char &#8243 in
font 'Trebuchet MS' rendering as a double
quote..

--
Andrew Thompson
http://www.PhySci.org/ Open-source software suite
http://www.PhySci.org/codes/ Web & IT Help
http://www.1point1C.org/ Science & Technology

#7

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Arne wrote:

Quote:

Would the entity for quotation mark be proper to use here,

"Proper"? No. A.Prilop should be along shortly to apply a
clue-iron...

Quote:

since it's similar to the symbol for inches?

Visual similarity is *no* criterion. There are Greek and Cyrillic
upper-case letters which visually resemble "A", but they're different
characters according to Unicode. There are Cyrillic letters
resembling C and P, for example, but they're not only different
*characters*, they are also different letters (S and R respectively).

You'd need to check the Unicode usage guidelines to see what they say
(about usage of compatibility characters). But since the HTML4
document character set is defined to be iso-10646/unicode, it's
perfectly *proper* to use the correct Unicode character. A
well-behaved browser (e.g Lynx) which did not have access to the
correct display character should use some other strategy to convey the
message. This continual pressure by IE on authors to dumb-down their
web pages is deplorable, even if it -is- understandable in the
circumstances.

#8

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Andrew Thompson wrote:

Quote:

I did a quick test on my XP Pro/IE 6.00.26
and had no problems with char &#8243 in
font 'Trebuchet MS' rendering as a double
quote..

Interesting data point, thanks. So either they've created a bigger
font, or done something else to get it working.

As a matter of interest, could I ask what's the size of the .ttf file
TREBUC.TTF on your system? On this Win2K/Pro system, for comparison,
it's given as "63.5KB (65,100 bytes)".

#9

On Tue, 18 May 2004 13:22:00 +0100, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

Quote:

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Andrew Thompson wrote:
I did a quick test on my XP Pro/IE 6.00.26
and had no problems with char &#8243 in
font 'Trebuchet MS' rendering as a double
quote..

..So either they've created a bigger font,

I think so.

Quote:

As a matter of interest, could I ask what's the size of the .ttf file
TREBUC.TTF on your system? On this Win2K/Pro system, for comparison,
it's given as "63.5KB (65,100 bytes)".

I seem to have 2 copies, both same size
"123KB (126,796 bytes)"

--
Andrew Thompson
http://www.PhySci.org/ Open-source software suite
http://www.PhySci.org/codes/ Web & IT Help
http://www.1point1C.org/ Science & Technology

#10

In message <s3lqc.4574$wI4.536306 (AT) wards (DOT) force9.net>, Mark Tranchant
<mark (AT) tranchant (DOT) plus.com> writes

Quote:

Take a look at this page:

http://tranchant.plus.com/cycling/gears/ratio

Just over half-way down is the sentence 'My wheels are approximately
27? in diameter'.

I use the ″ double prime for the inches symbol. My site uses the
Trebuchet MS font as a first choice where available.

On my machine, Firefox renders the double prime with no problems, but
Internet Explorer renders it as a square.

Why?

Looks OK to me.

IE, version 6.0.2800.1106IS

regards
--
Jake