HTML entities and charset in IE

Question

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?

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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

Solution 3

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

Solution 4

You can try the square root symbol, "√", which doesn't look perfect but ok. √

Solution 5

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 ☑).

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Comments

[Amit Patil]

Character references like ✓ are explicitly Unicode; the encoding of the page itself does not matter for these.

[Amit Patil]

+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.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Additional resource for finding out font support: fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/search.htm