views:

1689

answers:

6

I am displaying html entity ✓ (a check mark: ✓) in an html document that uses iso-8859-1 for the character set.

In Firefox, it displays as a check mark. In IE, it displays as a square box. Switching to UTF-8 doesn't seem to make a difference.

Is there a reliable way to display these entities in IE 6 & 7 without using images?

A: 

Per http://www.w3.org, the check mark isn't part of 8859-1: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/entities.html

It's e29c93 in UTF-8.

Andy Mikula
Okay but switching to UTF-8 doesn't make a difference. Is this yet another case of broken IE behavior or is there something else going on?
pbarney
Character references like ✓ are explicitly Unicode; the encoding of the page itself does not matter for these.
bobince
+6  A: 

Perhaps the typeface used by Internet Explorer doesn’t have a glyph to display this character.

Gumbo
+1. ✓ is always ✓ regardless of page encoding: if it doesn't appear, it's a font problem. Firefox generally has better font-substitution capabilities than IE. Find a font that has that character in it and list that first in the font style for the element containing it.
bobince
A: 

If it's IE, you can reasonably assume it's on Windows, and hence, there's a WingDings font available... The letter ü in MS WingDings is a simple checkmark (similar to ✓), and þ is a checkmark in a box (similar to ☑).

Stobor
+4  A: 

Square means that the font used does not have the glyph for that character.

Unfortunately, there are not many fonts containing that character, and none of them is present by default on all Windows machines (and even less on non-Windows ones)

The most likely fonts to be present (that contain that glyph) are Arial Unicode MS (comes with Officie), and MS Gothic + family (which is a Japanese font).

See here for a tool that can help you determine that font contains what glyphs: http://www.mihai-nita.net/article.php?artID=charmapex

But if you want a solution that works reliably, an image is your safest bet.

Mihai Nita
Useful link, thanks.
Kramii
A: 

You probably want to use font-family: Arial Unicode MS, Arial, Sans-Serif. IE does not display properly unicode chars from Arial...

Sorin Mocanu
A: 

Hello ! I am also facing this problem. Some entities are shown clearly and the rest are displayed by the square box. Resetting the IE did not help. UTF-8 encoding did not help.
[Sample page of entities][1] [1]:

http://i32.tinypic.com/21e9e2p.jpg

However the same page is shown correctly in my friends computer with IE -7. Microsoft suggested resetting the IE. But did not seem to help. I need help please.