How do i get the special character ☺ of a smiley face to render correctly in the mobile browsers?
<li><span style="font-size: 20px;"> ☺</span></li>
It appears on most browsers as [ ]
What you are seeing is a lack of that character in a font, not a character encoding problem.
There is nothing you can do about this, short of trying to use your own custom font (you may have mobile browser support problems). I would suggest using an image instead, if possible.
Related
I'm having problems with some Unicode character (🞻) not showing on iOS.
I have this line of code <p><a class="title" href="index.html">🞻 Luiso Vázquez</a></p> using the HTML entity of the character.
It looks good in desktop, but when it comes to Chrome on my iOS device it appears as an outlined square.
Is there anything I can do to solve this?
Thank you in advance
iOS's font doesn't cover the character you're trying to use. To fix this, you can either
Use a web font
Use an image of the character
Use a different character
I have a webfont that doesn't support Cyrillic. The font only has latin chars. If I try and display some Cyrillic chars, instead of displaying blank or corrupt chars (as I would expect it) it bypasses the webfont and displays them in a system font instead. Whilst this is a good thing I don't know why or how. As I understand it, if a font specified in the CSS isn't supported by a browser or the browser doesn't support webfonts it is then that a substitute font is put in place. However this is happening if the characters used aren't supported. Is my understanding of this correct?
it can be difficult when using a font that is not supported in your language.
It varies from font to font and browser to browser.
So there is no hard and fast rule sorry.
I would recommend making sure you HTML is set to support Unicode fonts.
<meta charset="utf-8">
I would also programme your font so it is in a stack,(has a default to full back on if unsupported)
And give it and test in all browsers to see if it defaults or doesn't show.
You may wish to find a font that is suited to that language.
Most browsers do missing character fallback by default, so you never see blank characters when something's missing. If the developer uses a font family stack like font-family: MyCyrillicFont, Arial, sans-serif your browser will use the next available font. Otherwise, the browser itself has a default font setting (that the user can typically choose).
In short, browsers have fallbacks on the characters level.
I have a huge problem. I just updated my websites homepage to display a unicode hexagon character: ⬢ ⬢ aka U+2B22
I made it 200px big and filled it with text. It looks good and works fine on my computer. With both Internet Explorer (win8) and Firefox 28.
I tested it on 5 different computers and it didn't work there! Tested with Firefox 28 and Internet Explorer (win7) on each device and on one computer even with the newest Chrome.
So what am I doing wrong? How is it possible that it works on my FF 28 and on 5 different devices with FF 28 it doesn't?
I already tried:
<?php header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); ?>
and in HTML directly:
meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"
Is U+2B22 not part of utf-8?
Try it yourself here, scroll to the very bottom of: http://jtauber.github.io/articles/css-hexagon.html
For my PC it looks like this: http://250kb.de/u/140401/j/RzN1lYTL8fLJ.jpg
On other devices it looks like this: http://250kb.de/u/140401/p/VEeerGhyv4lM.png
I appreciate any help!
The character U+2B22 BLACK HEXAGON is included in a few fonts only. None of those font comes with Windows or with other widely used software, so in most computers, there is no font containing it. Moreover, browsers may fail to render the character even if some font in the system has it. For some more general explanations, see my Guide to using special characters in HTML.
In this case, the font setting is font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica. None of those fonts contains the character, so each browser tries to use other fonts in the system, in a browser-dependent order. In your own computer, you have a font that contains the character. You may have downloaded and installed it, or it may have come along with some software
What you could do is, alternatively,
a) specify, in a font-family declaration, a list of fonts known to contain the character. This could help against problems of browsers not finding a font, but this would not matter much.
b) use a downloadable font (web font, via #font-face). This would mostly be overkill if you just want one character for essentially non-text use. Fonts that contain U+2B22 are generally large.
c) use an image instead, possibly as a background image. This would be here the rational choice, especially since you would not use U+2B22 as a character in text but as a background of a kind.
Regarding the question “Is U+2B22 not part of utf-8?”, characters aren’t really part of utf-8. Instead, utf-8 is a transfer encoding for characters, and all Unicode characters (and, moreover, all Unicode code points) have representations in utf−8. Besides, the page mentioned does not contain U+2B22 as such but as the character reference ⬢, and this works independently of character encodings. Thus, this is not an encoding problem, but a font issue.
These computers on which it does not work do not have a font installed which contains a glyph for this particular character. That is all.
Solutions would include to not depend on users having fonts with such unusual characters installed and provide them as web font instead (which you might have to create) or to use an image, SVG or canvas instead.
Here's a fiddle with some Unicode characters.
<p>★★★½☆</p>
Here it is rendered in Safari, looking as expected:
Here it is in Firefox:
I badly need Firefox to look like Safari. What exactly is going on here, and is there anything I can do about it?
Those characters aren't present in the font you're setting in your stylesheet, so the browser does fallback to some font that does have the characters. This fallback is done on a character-by-character basis, so different fonts can ed up being used for different characters. Specifically, I strongly doubt Times New Roman has those star characters.
I suggest setting a font that actually has the characters you're using in your stylesheet.
I had the same problem with © (copyright character) and I just wrapped it around a span tag and then changed the font-family and font-size attribute as suggested in the answer by Boris Zbarsky, and it worked perfectly.
while working on an international website, i'm confronted to an inconsistency, the font size differ on chrome/ff on the display of the arabic font, that i can't seem to fix in css only (base size of the font are differents so i can't fix them for all of them).
do you know a way to do that without JS, or should I make separate css with browser agent detection ?
thanks
i found that my problem was related to the lack of italic variant on my arabic font, i now have a consistent view on all cases