James Tauber

journeyman of some

blog > 2005 > 09 > 03 >

Font Fallback

When Safari encounters a character not available in the current font family, say Ὦ, it attempts to find another installed font family that has the character and uses that. It seems most, if not all, OS X applications have this property.

When Internet Explorer on Windows encounters a character not available in the current font family, it just gives up and displays a square. At first I thought this might be Windows in general, but Firefox on Windows has the same behaviour as Safari on OS X.

So it's just IE.

I'd be interested if anyone other than IE users on Windows gets a square here: Ὦ

Comments (5)

tim on Sept. 3, 2005:

Nope, on my WinXP sp2 machine the nice rectangle is only a "feature" of MSIE! In a normal browser I get an Ώ

xtian on Sept. 5, 2005:

Odd thing is, when I look at this post in IE, I get squares in your post, but the correct character in the comment above. (In FF they're all right, of course.)

Fredrik on Sept. 5, 2005:

If my software isn't playing games with me, the first one is a "GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA WITH PSILI AND PERISPOMENI" (Ὦ) while the latter is a "GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA WITH TONOS" (Ώ). If replacing a psili and a perispomeni with a tonos is really the right thing to do is more than I can tell...

Jake on Sept. 6, 2005:

I get a square using SharpReader.

Conrad on Sept. 7, 2005:

yes, I get a block on my IE.

On Amaya 9.1 I get an error stating "Not Well-Formed XML document", when I cancel that dialog it displays the page - (apparently) completely ignoring the said character!!!

Works fine on Firefox.
All on Win XP SP2.

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Created: Sept. 3, 2005
Last Modified: Sept. 3, 2005
Author: jtauber