program followed by MS Frontpage 4.0.
This file is
http://www.civlized.com/mlabexamples/lo ... index.html
It contains certain symbols such as the "less than or equal" symbol
which are rendered correctly in MS IE browser. These characters (in
particular the "less than or equal" character) are NOT rendered
correctly in Netscape (Neither are they rendered correctly on a Linux
system with Mozilla.)
The actual HTML source text specifying the "less than or equal" symbol
is:
<font face="symbol">£</font>
(The english "pound sterling" symbol is the 8 bit character hex A3
(0xA3)
This HTML encoding of the "less than or equal" symbol was done by
running a program called TTH (which stands for Tex To HTML). The TTH
program reads a .tex file and outputs its best guess for the
equivalent HTML. We then cleaned up the resulting HTML file with MS
Frontpage 4.0.
When we check our file with the W3C markup validation service
(http://validator.w3.org), we get a complaint that it was unable to
"extract a character encoding labeling..." from our file.
There is an option with the Netscape browser to select a "character
encoding" from a pull down menu. We don't understand what this means
or does. When we select something with the word "Greek" or "Russian"
we do not see greek or russian characters, we see latin characters as
usual, just in a slightly different graphic form - ie. it is still a
latin letter font that we have selected. Moreover the "pound
sterling" sign that is supposed to represent a "less than or equal
symbol" appears as some other symbol (such as 'gamma' or '?') on the
screen, but it still does not appear as a "less than or equal"
symbol. Obviously the HTML directive <font face="symbol"> means
nothing to Netscape, or at least not what we want it to mean.
Perhaps we should put some kind of HTML directive in our file
specifying an appropriate "character encoding" that would make
<font face="symbol">£</font> appear as the "less than or equal" symbol
that we want.
Perhaps our problem has something to do with how Netscape interprets
the 'symbol' "font face". We do not understand how any program, in
particular a browser, uses a text name to find out what pixels to
render on the screen.
Where can we find a definition of the fonts available to a Netscape
browser, and what is the difference between a font and a "character
encoding", and what should we put into our HTML file to render our
math symbols appropriately?
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
