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Learn@UW - Use Unicode Characters Instead of the Symbol Font to Specify Symbols

If you use the Symbol Font to specify a symbol (such as Greek character) in a document, it may not display correctly in certain browsers. For this reason, you should instead use Unicode characters to specify symbols.

Not all browsers currently use the same HTML standard that affects how characters in the Symbol font are displayed. For example, <span style="font-family: Symbol;">s</span> displays as a lower case sigma in Internet Explorer but a lower case s in Firefox.

Within the HTML editor, you can enter many common symbols and other characters as Unicode characters, including Greek characters, by using the "Insert custom character" icon ( ). This brings up a palette of about 200 characters you can select from to enter into your document.

These characters display correctly in all supported browsers.

You can also enter Unicode characters by editing the HTML source and entering the appropriate codes for the characters. These codes have one of these forms:

&name;	(name is the character name)
&#nnn;	(nnn is character code in decimal)
&#Xhhh;	(hhh is character code in hexadecimal)

For example, you can enter a lower case sigma ( σ ) using &sigma; &#963; or &#X3C3;

A complete list of codes for the Unicode characters can be found by visiting http://unicode.org/charts/.

See Also:

• Learn@UW - Recommended Software and Browsers