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
