Unicode characters and Internet Explorer

Question

I just built a site that relies on certain Unicode characters like Ⓐ, but why doesn\'t Internet Explorer show these characters?

Is there

Answer 1

Okay... here's the solution to your problem. You need to specify a Unicode font. E.g.

<p style="font-family: Arial Unicode MS;">&#9398;</p>

You've got to love IE... it will keep us all in business... forever.

Answer 2

This page helped me figure out which fonts would display correctly for me:

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/fontlist.htm?text=%E2%96%B6+-+Unicode+Character+%27BLACK+RIGHT-POINTING+TRIANGLE%27+%28U%2B25B6%29

Arial Unicode MS didn't seem available to me in Win XP IE8 on a VMWare virtual machine, but Lucida Sans Unicode appeared to work.

Then I wrote this SCSS mixin:

@mixin unicodeFont(){
    font-family: Lucida Sans Unicode, Arial Unicode MS, Arial;
}

Answer 3

There are only 128 ASCII characters. You're probably talking about Unicode. Please read The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

Whether IE will play nice is another matter. Under the View->Encodings menu you can override the character encoding setting for a web page.