Disappearing dingbat HTML objects

Question

I'm coming across a weird issue with displaying "dingbats" html entities, specifically ✔ (✔). i am trying to display some checkmarks, wrapped in a simple <span> :

 <span style="font-family: serif; font-size: 200%">&#x2714;</span> 

This works in Firefox 3.6, Chrome, and IE8 on my computer, but in Firefox 4 on the team’s computer, instead of displaying a checkmark, an empty space appears. Oddly enough, on the same computer, the checkbox displays correctly in IE9 and Chrome.

I tried to explicitly specify other fonts (including: Times New Roman, Arial, "Dingbats"), without specifying any specific font or even indicating any style information at all, all to no avail. I suppose I could use an image instead, but I wanted the flexibility to be able to style a character without having to create a new image every time.

Any suggestions on how to approach this?

EDIT: This is how this page (with hex search 2714) searches for it ...

IE 9:

IE 9 http://i53.tinypic.com/2ztejif.png

Firefox 4:

Firefox 4 http://i52.tinypic.com/28mol5d.jpg

Answer 1

This is a shot in the dark, but I remember that some browsers try to "guess" in the character set used, depending on the settings of the web server, content, etc. Can a browser display a character using the wrong character set?

Even when I read my own answer, I suspect that this may not be a problem ... but I thought that I would say this just in case.

Answer 2

I can not reproduce the error in FF4.01. However, this may be due to the fonts installed on your computer - as already suggested. Ask him to install the standard font on "Arial Unicode MS" or "Lucida Sans Unicode" (if these two do not appear in the list of fonts, your employee will need to install them) and see if it works.

If so, you should consider installing <span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', sans-serif;"> . Although this is apparently a very machine-specific problem, there is still a chance that this could happen on other machines.

Character encoding should not have any effect, it should work at least according to ISO-8859-1, as well as UTF-8 to UTF-32.

Answer 3

Some browsers can format the font. The user can specify the desired font. Even if the site uses a specific font, it will not be displayed.

Your employee may have added a value for this option.