361323 - math and greek symbols get lost

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 179945

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Jack Simons]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040316
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040316

I compose web pages in Word. I then save them as .html.
When I use (as I used to) Netscape Communicator, I see the greek and math just
fine (test the above link if you wish to see).
When my secretary uses Internet Exlporer, he sees the math and greek just fine.
However, when I use either Mozilla or Firefox, the greek/math gets replaced
(e.g., sigma is replaced by S, alpha by a).

I dont want to be told "you should compose your stuff differently". It seems to me that because Netscape used to be able to handle these issue, Mozilla and
Firefox should be able to as well. Cant someone just install the same "fonts"
(e.g., symbol font) as Netscape knew about?


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.just try out the link above http://simons.hec.utah.edu/TheoryPage/present_day_theoretical_ch.html
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
As I said, with Netscape Communicator, no problem. 
With Mozilla or Firefox, no greek/math

Expected Results:  
I should have seen all the greek and math symbols.

It should be able to display the symbol font and math characters.

Comment 1

[crf]

"I dont want to be told "you should compose your stuff differently" "

Too bad :-) . Compose your stuff differently. It's the right thing to do.
You can read all about this in bug #33127
You can also search the w3.org site, and other sites on the web about why improperly using symbol fonts is wrong for the web.

To write the letter a, b, c (etc) in your document, and then tell the user agent (mozilla, opera, explorer, wordpad, open office, notepad, etc) to read your document, but then use a font (that all users might not have) that substitutes 'a' and 'b' (etc) for greek and math symbols is wrong. Even if the users have that font (which they may not), some people might want to use their own fonts, rather than the ones the author specifies. And what about cutting and pasting from the screen? You can't do that, since you'll find out when you paste that you've just cut nonsense rather than a formula :(. Improper use of symbol fonts also cripples web usability for blind users who use braille or screen-readers. ...

It should be easy for you to fix. Use unicode in word, and a normal font. When you need a math symbol, use it's unicode symbol, or write the math symbol's html entity. They should be available from word using Insert->Symbol (I think), and there are tables or unicode and html entities available many places on the web for reference.

Also, unicode fonts that include most common math symbols are included in all modern windows OSes. So, if the page were rewritten in unicode, or with html entities for math characters, most of the users of your page shouldn't have any trouble correctly displaying it.

--

Comment 2

[crf]

see also 
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94319
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=179945

Comment 3

[Jake Olefsky]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 179945 ***