.
In that sense, I don't think U+24C2
CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M is the right answer.
I wasn't enthusiastic about it in practical terms, but I wouldn't rate
it as actually wrong. Still, it's a point of view, I won't argue
about it.
On the practical side, if you use U+24C2 (no matter how you enter it
in an HTML document), then it will probably be seen correctly only
by users who have Microsoft Office installed so that they have Arial
Unicode MS and by a small number of users who have installed
Code2000 or some of the rare fonts that support this character,
MSIE's behaviour is more complex than that. I'm seeing the circle-M
in MSIE when Lucida Sans Unicode is selected. Even though SIL
Viewglyph says that the font does not contain the character. I
suspect (as on previous encounters with this kind of behaviour) that
IE is supplementing the font's repertoire by using glyphs from the
far-eastern (CJK) fonts which it installs when one enables support for
"Far Eastern" languages (in Win/XP), or, say, Japanese in Win/2K.
Interesting resource, thanks, although it does say:
"This only includes fonts installed on this server."
I'm still missing a utility which could tell me "which of my installed
fonts contain a glyph for the character U+xxxx" ? Doing the converse
is easy, there are numerous utilities which will list the contents of
a given font, but I haven't seen one which will search the fonts for a
requested character.
Besides, people using IE would not see the character right even if
they have Arial Unicode MS, unless the browser has been set to use
that font by default (not a common or generally advisable choice by
a user) or your document explicitly suggests that font.
MSIE continues to show the glyph to me, even if I choose Tahoma.
Again, I think it's extending the selected font by using a CJK font.
For users, I really can recommend enabling CJK support, even though I
can't read any of the CJK languages. For developers, obviously it
could be a bit of a problem, as it then suggests that characters are
available when, for the default installation settings, they would not
be.
For completeness, I mention that an encircled "M" could also be
written in Unicode as letter "M" followed by U+20DD COMBINING
ENCLOSING CIRCLE, but this would be an even more problematic
approach in practice.
Agreed, which was why I deliberately didn't mention it :-}
Well, U+24c2 is a bona fide Unicode character, but it isn't the
Metro logo as such. I tried to make that distinction before. So it
hinges on what you mean by "symbol".
most probably would not have been included into Unicode.
There's at least one precedent as a Private Use Area character.
/
# NOTE: The graphic image associated with the Apple logo character is
# not authorized for use without permission of Apple, and unauthorized
# use might constitute trademark infringement.
0xF8FF # Apple logo # Roman-0xF0, Symbol-0xF0, Croatian-0xD8
\
cheers