Character Sets

Symbol font should not be used in Web pages. This page is not a demonstration of how to use Symbol font; it provides a warning of the problems that it causes, and shows how to use Unicode instead.

Monotype Typography produce their non-Unicode Symbol font in a Windows OpenType^® version which is supplied with Windows Vista, a Windows TrueType^® version which was supplied with Windows 3.1x, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, a Macintosh TrueType version which was supplied with Mac OS 9, and PostScript^® versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX.

For Windows, browsers such as Internet Explorer, Netscape 4 and Safari that are not standards-compliant allow non-Unicode fonts such as Symbol to be specified in HTML or CSS, to enable the basic Greek alphabet and many other special characters to be displayed. Specifying Symbol font is contrary to the published specifications, has never been a documented feature of HTML, is not reliable, and should not be done. Even though the Macintosh and Windows versions of Symbol font have identical character sets, a Web page that specifies Symbol font and displays correctly on Windows cannot be relied on when viewed with Internet Explorer under Mac OS – the Greek letters display as intended, but many of the other characters do not.

The more standards-compliant browsers, such as Firefox, Netscape 6+, Opera 6+ and SeaMonkey (formerly Mozilla), do not support non-Unicode fonts such as Symbol, and correctly display the normal Unicode characters instead. For example, they display D instead of Δ for decimal code point 68.

Fortunately, the greatly extended range of character entity references supported in HTML 4.01 together with the increased number of characters in Microsoft’s WGL4 TrueType fonts and Apple’s Lucida Grande font provide an easier and more reliable way to display most of the characters for which the Symbol font was formerly required. Even more characters are becoming displayable as Unicode support in browsers and fonts becomes more widespread. The fourth and fifth columns in the following tables show how to use Unicode characters that are equivalent to almost all of the characters in Symbol font.

With Mac OS X 10.1, Apple supply a system font called Symbol that has the characters at their Unicode code points.

In the following tables, the first 2 columns are intended to demonstrate the problems caused by using Symbol font. It is possible that your combination of browser and operating system will show Greek and special characters, but browsers that conform to the published standards will demonstrate why Symbol font should not be used in Web pages.

If you want to print this page, you will probably need to use landscape orientation.

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Latin-1 Supplement : Unicode U+0080 – U+00FF (128–255)

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Latin Extended-B : Unicode U+0180 – U+024F (384–591)

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Greek : Unicode U+0370 – U+03FF (880–1023)

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General Punctuation : Unicode U+2000 – U+206F (8192–8303)

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Letterlike Symbols : Unicode U+2100 – U+214F (8448–8527)

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Currency Symbols : Unicode U+20A0 – U+20CF (8352–8399)

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Arrows : Unicode U+2190 – U+21FF (8592–8703)

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Mathematical Operators : Unicode U+2200 – U+22FF (8704–8959)

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Miscellaneous Technical : Unicode U+2300 – U+23FF (8960–9215)

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Geometric Shapes : Unicode U+25A0 – U+25FF (9632–9727)

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Miscellaneous Symbols : Unicode U+2600 – U+26FF (9728–9983)

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Character with no Unicode equivalent