At 08:17 +0200 on 01/11/2011, Jukka K. Korpela wrote about Re:
[css-d] slight layout change: center numbers in circles:
Bob Rosenberg wrote:
You can also just use the numbers in the U+2776-U+2793 range which
will give you 1-10 as Serif numbers in black or white circles as well
as Sans-Serif 1-10 in black circles. Why fool around when the
characters exist in your fonts?
On the theoretical side: because these "characters" are dingbats,
i.e. specific graphics encoded as characters in a technical sense
but not true text characters.
On the practical side: because they mostly _don't_ exist in fonts.
See the short font list at
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2776/fontsupport.htm
People's computers may have other fonts containing dingbats, but a)
the appearances may be surprising and b) those fonts may have
non-Unicode encodings.
You are looking at the situation backwards. Admittedly the characters
do not exist in every font. This does not however prevent them from
being displayed. So long as the font-family that is active when the
&#xxxxx; entry is encountered AND one of the fonts listed exists on
the user's system, the character SHOULD be displayed. I am not sure
what the rules are when the first selected font does not contain the
character but a subsequent one does (ie: Will it search the
subsequent fonts for the character or just give up since it has found
a prior font that is usable). The best solution is to ONLY list fonts
that contain the needed character. Also make sure that for each
platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) you list a system font with the
character (ie: Those Fonts that are common to more than one platform
or are always installed on a platform).
For Windows and Macintosh listing Arial Unicode MS, ITC Zapf
Dingbats, and Zapf Dingbats should insure that you will always find
at least one available font on the user's system. I am not sure what
font to use for Linux but I think that a Zapf Dingbats font exists
there and will be installed.
Note the to insure that the first available font is used, you should
declare a CSS class (such as dingbat) that lists ONLY the fonts with
the characters and code the &#xxxxx; as <span
class="dingbat">&#xxxxx;</span>.
I hope this helps and explains my suggestion.
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
______________________________________________________________________
css-discuss [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org]
http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d
List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/
List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html
Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
