Running xp pro sp3 and FF 3.6, all of it it french versions, let’s assume i want to play bridge, and admit that i am very lousy at it and need some tutorials.
Let’s connect to the following (and quite old, i don’t know what’s it’s optimized for) site.
It is written in french, but this point is not relevant as i am only interested in pictures and symbols:
After the words “Après l’entame de l’AS de”, it should be the red symbol for hearts (actually the red copyright symbol) and after “Il dispose en effet de la DAME et du 5 de”, it should be the black symbol for spades (actually a upper green “a” symbol).
If downloading the site and opening offline with a web editing software, the symbols are correct, but the color still green for clubs and spades.
In the example of the Ace of hearts, the code reads:
Curiously indeed showing the copyright sign instead of the hearts sign or the correct value in the symbol police table (ALT-0169 or 0xA9), altough “FF0000” is actually supposed to code “red”.
I of course can edit the whole offline site, and replace the coding by the correct gif images, but it is a real pain, and doesn’t account either for this strange behavior i suspect to happen with other sites using the same code.
Thanks to anyone having either a solution or explanation.
I have a reason why I think this happens. I’m not an expert, though.
Anyway, the HTML code has something like this:
<font color="#00FF00" face="symbol">§</font>
“0xA7” is the hexadecimal form of “167”.
I opened Character Map, which has all the different characters of all installed fonts.
Going to a standard font, Arial, I went to the character that had the unicode number “0xA7”. It was §.
Now, notice this part of the code:
face="symbol"
So in the Character Map, I switched to the “Symbol” font.
I looked up the character that had the unicode number “0xA7”…and guess what, it was a clubs symbol (the one like a clover).
So basically, you are just seeing what symbol is usually displayed for the unicode number “0xA7” or “§”, and not the special font the website uses.
You were somehow on the good way:
i tested the same link is old IE6, and it works; excepting that blacks cards are still green, but it’s another story, maybe the website writer didn’t write the colors right, i shall have to check.
The guy is nevertheless probably very good at bridge, but not so in web editing, as he should have observed either that card gif pictures are browser independent, either that whatever convention using a peculiar police is not W3C compliant:
he should have written, e.g.:
&spades;
The “bug”, in what we are concerned with, is that Firefox doesn’t know symbol font, and substitutes whatever is defined in general options (Times New Roman, Arial), translating the correct symbol in “copyright” or whatever.
Two solutions have been suggested as far as i have seen:
-FF is open source: it would be enough to rewrite Mozilla’s font encoding tables (curiously enough, it has default ones for MathML, not a frequent concept outside of LaTex writing, but not for symbol), but i am not sure to have the required skills, and sure i don’t have the time to “hack” and gather what other wrote in this regard).
-A very “exotic”, easy, and working one, as described at: http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/firefox3.html
I shall keep for some time “symbols.ttf” on my desktop, i am not sure of what shall happen next if some windows also “exotic” application thinks it needs it…
Also note the very interesting integrated link, telling you if some extended characters are correctly interpreted (i had some time ago, altough my web editor is MathMl able, a lot of trouble reading chemical equations in Firefox, it might be the reason).
It would be the same as long as the site does not abide by W3C and uses the symbol font and as long as i don’t use IE (no way for this last hypothesis…)
I’m not an expert, though.