On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 6:58 PM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
I'm using Chrome 3.0.195.21, and have long found that some characters in Wikipedia render as boxes. One example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_with_stroke renders as "<box> (minuscule: <box>)..."
As the article says, the characters were only added to Unicode in 2005 and 2006. It's to be expected that even good Unicode fonts might not yet support them. The article even notes that few fonts support the characters.
Now, I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Special_characters and the advice is not very useful or specific: it says that "Special symbols should display properly without further configuration with ... Safari and most other recent browsers." I tried installing Gnu Unifont and setting it as the default browser font, but that seems to be overridden by MediaWiki anyway?
No, GNU Unifont probably just doesn't have those characters. The default fonts on Ubuntu seem to have the majuscule but not the minuscule (or at least that's how Chrome and Firefox both render the page).
So anyway, I'm asking two questions:
- What can I do to get more special characters to render correctly in Chrome?
Get better fonts. Realistically, you should do this by waiting a few years until your preinstalled fonts hopefully support the character.
- Could/would anyone improve [[Help:Special characters]] to make it
clearer, more specific and correct?
It needs to note that there's no font out there that really supports *all* of Unicode, especially since Unicode keeps changing. Wikipedia editors need to decide on a case-by-case basis whether a Unicode character is supported widely enough to justify using it in an article's text, or whether an image should be used instead.