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I'm making heavy use of → / ← arrow symbols in HTML so that i spare myself the pain of having to go with images. This is for an enclosed system, not for a public website.

Now i noticed that my client does not have those symbols in their charsets somehow - and i am wondering why. Since i am using CSS to select the font, the charset should be the same, right? And the symbols should be available. But they are not. Instead they just get blanks.

The font in use is Verdana.

SquareCat
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2 Answers2

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Since i am using CSS to select the font, the charset should be the same, right?

Not necessarily: The font might not be installed on every machine, and fonts can have different versions. You can't trust every client machine 100% to have exactly the font you need.

See this question for more background and approaches to determine font support for a specific glyph: Unicode support in Web standard fonts

The only way to make pretty sure the user has the correct font is to embed it into your web page using @font-face or using a hosted one by Google Web Fonts. In all browsers that support this method, you can then trust the same font to be delivered to every client.

However, embedding a font using font-face is tantamount to redistributing it, which most commercial licenses do not allow (see e.g. the Microsoft Typography FAQ). You would need to find a completely free font that allows redistribution this way - ideally one from Google's portfolio, or from a place like the Open Font Library.

Community
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Pekka
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  • That is straightforward and very helpful input. I would go for font-face. Should i just get verdana.ttf from my system and use that file? Given the fact that things are displayed correctly on my system in Firefox using Verdana, will that do? – SquareCat Nov 27 '11 at 11:44
  • @user I think you *could* embed Verdana.ttf this way and it *should* work, but you would be in violation of the MS font license. I would choose an open font that contains the character(s) you need. I added a paragraph about the issue – Pekka Nov 27 '11 at 11:49
  • Thank you for your amazing help. Ten Thumbs up! Q/A closed. – SquareCat Nov 27 '11 at 11:50
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These symbols are not included in Verdana. Use e.g. Arial, Times, Courier New, Garamond

Dr.Molle
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    That is an interesting addition. I will have to look into this. So i assume Firefox is picking the symbols from another fontset automatically then? And on my clients machine it can't because it can't find any? I'll look through the sets and see what i can use. Thanks for this! – SquareCat Nov 27 '11 at 11:57
  • Indeed, Verdana does not contain the arrows you want. – Mihai Nita Nov 28 '11 at 09:25