100621 - No Symbol Font

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 33127

(Core :: CSS Parsing and Computation, defect)

Description

[Michael A. Sypes]

I cannot get the symbol font to display at all, whether the style is defined
specifically in a tag, referenced as a class within the document, or referenced
as a class in an external style sheet.
It's important to me as a chemist to be able to display Greek letters and other
such characters.

Comment 1

[R.K.Aa.]

This bug is considered invalid..
Dup.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 33127 ***

Comment 2

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

Michael: If you want a greek letter, just type the greek directly into your
document (if you use UTF8) or use HTML entities, as in:

   α β γ

...and so on. If you say "A" then we will render an "A", whatever font you
pick... it just happens that the Symbol font doesn't _have_ an "A" character.

Comment 3

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-5, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Wow, I can't even get a word in. :-)

Our behavior is required by a number of specs (most importantly, HTML 4.0) and
is very important for internationalization.  According to CSS2, each character
should be displayed using the first available font in the font-family list that
has that character.  For example, if you want your Greek characters to be
displayed in Symbol rather than some other font with greek characters, you could
say (assuming Times New Roman has no Greek characters, which, depending on your
version, may be an incorrect assumption):

<p style="font-family: Times New Roman, Symbol, serif;">The hydrostatic equation
is dp/dz = -g&rho;.</p>

Comment 4

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-5, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Attachment: Document giving example of UTF-8 encoded Greek