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 display

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

I specified the font attributes in a style tag and the checkmark is displayed properly in IE7 which is what the majority of my clients are using. Example:

✓ Some text

Answer 3

Per http://www.w3.org, the check mark isn't part of 8859-1: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/entities.html

It's e29c93 in UTF-8.

Answer 4

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

Answer 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 ☑).

Answer 6

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