Help with font symbols

[Mark Tranchant]

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.

[Els]

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.

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

[Alan J. Flavell]

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.
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?

[Arne]

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 :-)

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

--
/Arne

[Els]

Arne wrote:

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)
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 -

[Andrew Thompson]

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

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

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Arne wrote:

Would the entity for quotation mark be proper to use here,
"Proper"? No. A.Prilop should be along shortly to apply a
clue-iron...
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.

[Alan J. Flavell]

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..

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)".

[Andrew Thompson]

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

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.
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

[Markus Ernst]

"Els" <el*********@tiscali.nl> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:40**********************@dreader2.news.tiscal i.nl...

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.

Also mine. Maybe it would help to tell the browser which character set to
use:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">

HTH
Markus

[jake]

In message <s3*******************@wards.force9.net>, Mark Tranchant
<ma**@tranchant.plus.com> writes

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

[Mark Tranchant]

Markus Ernst wrote:

Also mine. Maybe it would help to tell the browser which character set to
use:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">

My server already does this. The META tag isn't the best way to achieve
this: see http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/charset.html.

Just in case this was a bizarre IE glitch (never!), I tried adding this
line to that page, but it made no difference.

--
Mark.

[Mark Tranchant]

Andrew Thompson wrote:

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)"

OK, so I should add a "best viewed with the 123KB version of Trebuchet
MS" to my pages.

Thanks for the feedback.

--
Mark.

[Harlan Messinger]

"Mark Tranchant" <ma**@tranchant.plus.com> wrote in message
news:oB*******************@wards.force9.net...

Andrew Thompson wrote:

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)"

OK, so I should add a "best viewed with the 123KB version of Trebuchet
MS" to my pages.

Please say you're joking.

[Harlan Messinger]

"Markus Ernst" <derernst@NO#SP#AMgmx.ch> wrote in message
news:40**********************@news.easynet.ch...

"Els" <el*********@tiscali.nl> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:40**********************@dreader2.news.tiscal i.nl...

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.

Also mine. Maybe it would help to tell the browser which character set to
use:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">

This tells your browser what character set the incoming stream is encoded
in, not what character set to use for display. Characters with codes greater
than 255 don't even have any meaning in iso-8859-1, which is a single-byte
character set. At best, giving the encoding assures that the browser
interprets the ampersand as an ampersand, the pound sign as a pound sign,
and "8", "2", "4", "3", and ";" as what they're supposed to be.

[Markus Ernst]

"Mark Tranchant" <ma**@tranchant.plus.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:vz*******************@wards.force9.net...

Markus Ernst wrote:

Also mine. Maybe it would help to tell the browser which character set to use:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">

My server already does this. The META tag isn't the best way to achieve
this: see http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/charset.html.

Thanks for the link; I did not know that. Anyway as I am on shared hosting
and do not have control over server settings I will let the meta tag
there...

--
Markus

[Mark Tranchant]

Harlan Messinger wrote:

"Mark Tranchant" <ma**@tranchant.plus.com> wrote in message
news:oB*******************@wards.force9.net...

OK, so I should add a "best viewed with the 123KB version of Trebuchet
MS" to my pages.

Please say you're joking.

http://tranchant.plus.com/

;-)

--
Mark.

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Mark Tranchant reveals that:

Markus Ernst wrote:

Also mine. Maybe it would help to tell the browser which character set to
use:
This is a misunderstanding. OK, it's a misunderstanding that was
shared by the authors of NN4.* versions, but they are past history;
MSIE might get lots of things wrong, but this isn't one of them.

The Document Character Set in HTML4 is iso-10646/unicode, irrespective
of the external character coding that is used.
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">

That's the ersatz way of defining the document's character encoding
for HTML. (XHTML follows XML rules, on the other hand.)
My server already does this.
Good show ;-))
The META tag isn't the best way to achieve
this: see http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/charset.html.
Right; but neither of them define the "character set" in HTML terms;
the MIME attribute which is (misleadingly) called "charset" defines
the character encoding. This terminology shift is an unfortunate
piece of history. Every user of HTML should (but I *would* say that,
wouldn't I, as this is one of my special subjects) make the effort to
understand the HTML character model per RFC2070 and HTML4.
Just in case this was a bizarre IE glitch (never!), I tried adding this
line to that page, but it made no difference.

Quite right.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Mark Tranchant <ma**@tranchant.plus.com> wrote:

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

I can confirm the observations made in this thread: Trebuchet MS has
different character repertoires in different Windows systems (the double
prime is present on the Win XP I'm using but not on Win 98).

But I made a strange observation: Opera shows the double prime properly
even on Win 98, but it shows the prime (used as a symbol for feet in the
document) as a straight, vertical symbol, like the Ascii apostrophe. The
strange thing is that it seems to be configured (by factory settings) to
use Times New Roman as the fallback font for General Punctuation block,
and that font has both the prime and the double prime.

It's probably nothing more than yet another oddity, not to be taken too
seriously. But I think the practical conclusion is pretty clear: it's
better to avoid the prime and the double primer on Web pages for a
general audience and use Ascii apostrophe and Ascii quotation mark as
surrogates - they are widely recognized and used in this function.

Alternatively, go metric. :-)

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Brian]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

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.

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.

Could the same thing happen if a user configured IE/Win to use a font
that did not contain a required character?

--
Brian (remove "invalid" from my address to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

[Andreas Prilop]

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Mark Tranchant wrote:

http://tranchant.plus.com/cycling/gears/ratio
Just over half-way down is the sentence 'My wheels are approximately 27?
in diameter'.

Do *not* specify wheels and tyres in this obsolete unit inch!
Follow ETRTO and ISO 5775 and specify the diameter in millimetres.

<http://tandem-fahren.de/Technik/Reifentips/>
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/metric-system-faq.txt>
<http://www.google.com/search?q=ETRTO+millimeters>

--
Top-posting.
What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

[Andreas Prilop]

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

Alternatively, go metric. :-)

ETRTO requires designation of bicycle tyres in millimetres
since about 30 years.
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-5775.html>

--
Top-posting.
What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

[Mark Tranchant]

Andreas Prilop wrote:

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

Alternatively, go metric. :-)

ETRTO requires designation of bicycle tyres in millimetres
since about 30 years.
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-5775.html>

You can pry my inch-based gear tables from the hands of my cold, dead
corpse. I hate metric gearing systems.

--
Mark.

[Brian]

Markus Ernst wrote:

"Mark Tranchant" <ma**@tranchant.plus.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:vz*******************@wards.force9.net...

Markus Ernst wrote:

<meta http-equiv="content-type"
content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">

The META tag isn't the best way to achieve this: see
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/charset.html.

as I am on shared hosting and do not have control over server
settings

Are you sure about that? I am on a shared server, too. But the ip uses
Apache, and allows directory configuration via .htaccess.

--
Brian (remove "invalid" from my address to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Brian wrote:

Could the same thing happen if a user configured IE/Win to use a font
that did not contain a required character?

Sure could. And as my page shows, the implications are far from
intuitive.
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...ers-fonts.html

So you need a very well-informed user of IE[1] in order to get a wide
character repertoire to work; but my point is that there's nothing
which a document author can do in the document to make it better for
them. Every well-intentioned proposal which might help some subset of
readers seems doomed to make things worse for some other subset.

[1] assuming of course that even when they are well-informed they
would still be using IE, rather than deciding Mozilla etc. was a
better choice.

[Brian]

Mark Tranchant wrote:

I should add a "best viewed with the 123KB version of
Trebuchet MS" to my pages.

http://tranchant.plus.com/

Very good, M. Tranchant! If I had a blog, I'd link to that site today.
(I really should start a blog. It'd give me something more meaningful to
do than hang around ciwa* when I grow of tired of my never-ending search
for a job.)

--
Brian (remove "invalid" from my address to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

[Arne]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Arne wrote:

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

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

OK, just asking :-)
I would use the entity &Prime;
But since the meter system is what we use, I print out "inch" on those
occasions I have to. :-)

--
/Arne

URL: http://www.pajala.tk
------------------------------------------
Get your personal ad free domain and email
account for free at http://www.dot.tk
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[Harlan Messinger]

"Mark Tranchant" <ma**@tranchant.plus.com> wrote in message
news:AS*******************@wards.force9.net...

Harlan Messinger wrote:

"Mark Tranchant" <ma**@tranchant.plus.com> wrote in message
news:oB*******************@wards.force9.net...

OK, so I should add a "best viewed with the 123KB version of Trebuchet
MS" to my pages.

Please say you're joking.

http://tranchant.plus.com/

;-)

LOL!

[Brian]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

you need a very well-informed user of IE[1] in order to get a wide
character repertoire to work

[1] assuming of course that even when they are well-informed they
would still be using IE, rather than deciding Mozilla etc. was a
better choice.

More plausible then you might imagine. I've worked in not a few offices
where only MSIE/Win was available.

Then again, I had no more right to configure my system then I had to
install functioning software. So the point still stands. :-)

--
Brian (remove "invalid" from my address to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

[Darin McGrew]

Brian <us*****@julietremblay.com.invalid> wrote:

More plausible then you might imagine. I've worked in not a few offices
where only MSIE/Win was available.

Then again, I had no more right to configure my system then I had to
install functioning software. So the point still stands. :-)

I worked at a company like that a while ago. Every time I logged in, my
controlled-by-corporate-IT profile was updated to the current officially
blessed profile. And that included browser configuration settings.

There were still ways for sufficiently motivated power users to configure
their desktop environment, but it was a non-trivial exercize.
--
Darin McGrew, mc****@stanfordalumni.org, http://www.rahul.net/mcgrew/
Web Design Group, da***@htmlhelp.com, http://www.HTMLHelp.com/

"Men build too many walls and not enough bridges." - Sir Isaac Newton

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Arne <ar********@telia.com> wrote:

I would use the entity &Prime;
But since the meter system is what we use, I print out "inch" on those
occasions I have to. :-)

Originally, entities were introduced into SGML with the idea that
constructs like &Prime; could have different definitions in different
situations, resulting in different renderings. For example, a primitive
system could use the Ascii quotation mark, an advanced one could use the
double prime character, and a name (in a suitable language) could be used
too.

HTML took just the idea of entities as "named character references" and
gave them fixed meanings.

To make things worse, there's no way to refer to entities (or character
references) in CSS. They basically don't exist in CSS, since CSS "sees"
just the parsed characters.

This means that to get variation in rendering, according to browsing
situations, we would need clumsy constructs like
<span class="Prime">&Prime;</span>
with CSS code like
.Prime { content: " inches"; }
or, as the case may be,
.Prime { content: "\22 "; }
And this approach is currently supported by minority browsers only.
(Of course, the use of &Prime; vs. ″ vs. the double prime as a
charcter is irrelevant here.)
(In fact it might be better to use <span class="Prime">"</span>, since
this would work very robustly in non-CSS situations.)

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/