∗ displays box...

[Aaron]

I'm trying to use the Low Asterisk in IE6 but it just displays a small
rectangle box.

Works ok in Firefox.

Any suggestions?

 

[Dylan Parry]

Pondering the eternal question of "Hobnobs or Rich Tea?", Aaron finally
proclaimed:

I'm trying to use the Low Asterisk in IE6 but it just displays a small
rectangle box.

IE6 doesn't appear to support the entity ∗. It also doesn't
appear to support ⁎ or ⁎ either, so I would guess that you
are pretty much out of luck. Interestingly, I couldn't get the latter
two to work with FF either, whereas the entity name worked fine.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, Dylan Parry wrote:

[IE]

doesn't appear to support ⁎ or ⁎ either, so I would
guess that you are pretty much out of luck.

I don't see any reason why IE would need to "support" it - it's just
another character in a font, in Plane-0, with no special properties -
if it's available in an appropriate font, it should just plain work,
when that font is used.

The catch is that it's not in WGL4.0, so the bog-standard fonts that
come with Windoze are less likely to contain it.

Hmmm, http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/unicode/unidata20.html#x204E
The fact that Mozilla is showing it for me, seems to prove that I've
got it *somewhere* in the Windows fonts on this XP system, but I would
need to hunt around to find which one it might be, and then
reconfigure IE to use the right one. Hmmm, Opera is showing it too.

This is where it *really* would be useful to know what font was being
*used* for the rendering (not merely which font is specified by the
preferences and CSS - that's easy!).

Hmmm, looks to me as if Moz. and Opera found it, in this particular
setup, in the font Aboriginal Sans. Yup, if I reconfigure MSIE to use
Aboriginal Sans as its default "Latin" font, this character appears,
and it (and its neighbours) look just like the ones which Mozilla and
Opera had found.


Surely it's easier (and safer all round) to install and use a
WWW-compatible browser, than to struggle along with that elderly
operating-system component that thinks it's a web browser? But of
course there's also one's sad readers to think about. Pathetic,
really.

 

[Aaron]

On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, Dylan Parry wrote:

[IE]

doesn't appear to support ⁎ or ⁎ either, so I would
guess that you are pretty much out of luck.

I don't see any reason why IE would need to "support" it - it's just
another character in a font, in Plane-0, with no special properties -
if it's available in an appropriate font, it should just plain work,
when that font is used.

The catch is that it's not in WGL4.0, so the bog-standard fonts that
come with Windoze are less likely to contain it.

Hmmm, http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/unicode/unidata20.html#x204E
The fact that Mozilla is showing it for me, seems to prove that I've
got it *somewhere* in the Windows fonts on this XP system, but I would
need to hunt around to find which one it might be, and then
reconfigure IE to use the right one. Hmmm, Opera is showing it too.

This is where it *really* would be useful to know what font was being
*used* for the rendering (not merely which font is specified by the
preferences and CSS - that's easy!).

Hmmm, looks to me as if Moz. and Opera found it, in this particular
setup, in the font Aboriginal Sans. Yup, if I reconfigure MSIE to use
Aboriginal Sans as its default "Latin" font, this character appears,
and it (and its neighbours) look just like the ones which Mozilla and
Opera had found.


Surely it's easier (and safer all round) to install and use a
WWW-compatible browser, than to struggle along with that elderly
operating-system component that thinks it's a web browser? But of
course there's also one's sad readers to think about. Pathetic,
really.

My IE6 displays mostly small rectangle boxes for that Unicode range 20 link.

Is there some way to register or *Initialize* a browser on load?
Or Declare a character set? or
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"> ?

You can tell I'm an amateur at this, but this sounds logical.

 

[Toby Inkster]

This is where it *really* would be useful to know what font was being
*used* for the rendering (not merely which font is specified by the
preferences and CSS - that's easy!).

http://message-id.net/<[email protected]>

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

http://message-id.net/<[email protected]>

I *had* actually spotted that, and saved it for later investigation,
thanks; but it seems it's specific to unix-oid versions: when tried on
Win32 Opera, nothing interesting happened.

http://www.opera.com/docs/switches/ doesn't look promising, as far as
Windows is concerned.

Sorry...

 

[Harlan Messinger]

On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, Dylan Parry wrote:

[IE]

doesn't appear to support ⁎ or ⁎ either, so I would
guess that you are pretty much out of luck.

[snip]
Hmmm, looks to me as if Moz. and Opera found it, in this particular
setup, in the font Aboriginal Sans. Yup, if I reconfigure MSIE to use
Aboriginal Sans as its default "Latin" font, this character appears,
and it (and its neighbours) look just like the ones which Mozilla and
Opera had found.

Don't be too quick to praise Firefox and Opera. I noticed that &lowast;
and &#8270 weren't displaying as the same character. I tried this:

<p>|&lowast;|&lowast;|&lowast;|&lowast;|</p>
<p>|⁎|⁎|⁎|⁎|</p>
<p>|∗|∗|∗|∗|</p>

and found that Firefox and Opera were assigning &lowast to ∗,
"asterisk operator", rather than to ⁎, "low asterisk". Or so it
seems from their respective appearances.

 

[Alan Wood]

Don't be too quick to praise Firefox and Opera. I noticed that &lowast;
and &#8270 weren't displaying as the same character. I tried this:

<p>|&lowast;|&lowast;|&lowast;|&lowast;|</p>
<p>|⁎|⁎|⁎|⁎|</p>
<p>|∗|∗|∗|∗|</p>

and found that Firefox and Opera were assigning &lowast to ∗,
"asterisk operator", rather than to ⁎, "low asterisk". Or so it
seems from their respective appearances.

Here is an extract from the W3C Recommendation:

<!ENTITY lowast CDATA "∗" -- asterisk operator, U+2217 ISOtech
-->

<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html>

This suggests that Firefox and Opera are complying with the
recommendations.

 

[Alan Wood]

Don't be too quick to praise Firefox and Opera. I noticed that &lowast;
and &#8270 weren't displaying as the same character. I tried this:

<p>|&lowast;|&lowast;|&lowast;|&lowast;|</p>
<p>|⁎|⁎|⁎|⁎|</p>
<p>|∗|∗|∗|∗|</p>

and found that Firefox and Opera were assigning &lowast to ∗,
"asterisk operator", rather than to ⁎, "low asterisk". Or so it
seems from their respective appearances.

Here is an extract from the W3C Recommendation:

<!ENTITY lowast CDATA "∗" -- asterisk operator, U+2217 ISOtech
-->

<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html>

This suggests that Firefox and Opera are complying with the
recommendations.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

Don't be too quick to praise Firefox and Opera.
Hmmm?

I noticed that &lowast; and
&#8270 weren't displaying as the same character.
[...]
and found that Firefox and Opera were assigning &lowast to ∗,
"asterisk operator", rather than to ⁎, "low asterisk".

Then they are implementing HTML4.01 as defined:

<!ENTITY lowast CDATA "∗" -- asterisk operator, U+2217 ISOtech
-->

I hadn't noticed that before. If this is a blunder, then it appears
to have been there in the ISOtech entity set for quite some years, and
presumably inherited by HTML, as a search for the terms e.g

ISOtech ISO 8879:1986//ENTITIES lowast

will reveal.

I don't use these named character entities, and had not noticed the
discrepancy before.