How to determine if Unicode characters are displayed correctly on my web page?

Question

I am trying to use a rather esoteric Unicode character on a website - in particular "︙". Windows XP, as far as I know, did not ship with a font that included a glyph for this character - the test image of Virtual PC IE 6 does not display it anyway.

Is there any way to determine if the symbol is displayed correctly if people look at the site using Windows XP without Arial Unicode MS installed?

An answer to a similar question suggested comparing the width of an element containing only this character with the width of an element containing a non-print Unicode character. Unfortunately, both seem to be rendering in the same width in browsers that also display my character.

Answer 1

Try using ⋮ ( ⋮ ), which is an alternate symbol for the same thing (vertical ellipse). I'm not sure why there are two glyphs for this, and they are slightly different; in my own testing, & # XFE19; ( ︙ ) uses circles for points, and the other uses squares. It probably depends on the font. In general, you need to increase the font size to ridiculous sizes to notice the difference.

Answer 2

What you are trying to do is almost impossible, at least in a safe way .

Instead, you should clearly define your supported audience by indicating exactly which browsers you will support, and a warning for unsupported browsers.

BTW, do not display a warning for any browser that it has not been identified by you, only for those that have been identified as bad.

You can add a built-in font, but this will only work on some browsers and possibly on mobile devices. I would not recommend that you use such esoteric characters.

One idea http://www.devslide.com/labs/browser-detection

NOTE In the text above, I see the browser as a combination of the browser and the operating system. Today, most browsers correctly display Unicode characters, BUT fonts do not, and the user will see fields instead of the correct characters. A well-designed web page should correctly display the default fonts that exist on the client computer.

Answer 3

Use the built-in font. You must have 4 versions of the font file for it to work in all browsers, but it works in IE6 Up and in all modern browsers, including iOS mobile devices.

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator

You can download the TTF font and return the entire package as a download — all the necessary font and CSS files plus a sample page for testing. I did not find a browser in which this will not work (including 1-2 versions from the current one, depending on the browser).

Answer 4

I'm not sure you need to worry about this ... according to Microsoft's site, Arial Unicode MS is automatically installed for Windows XP.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio-help/install-the-universal-font-for-unicode-HP005255840.aspx