Having Problems With Symbols?
MacIntosh browser font problems
The characters with codes higher than 127 in the Mac fonts are in a different order from the standard ISO-8859-1 (sometimes called ISO
Latin-1). If Netscape or IE on Macs have their document encoding set to the standard, then in versions 3 onwards they are programmed
to access the glyph where they think the corresponding accented Latin character will be in the Mac font. This is fine if one really wants an
accented Latin character. However, for mathematics, using the symbol font (which is ordered the SAME on the Mac as on other
platforms) the result is that one gets the wrong symbol glyph. This is a particular problem with large delimiters. The fix is that the Mac
browser must be set to use the Options/Document-encoding ``MacRoman". This tells the browser not to do the permutation to access
the accented Latin characters in the Mac places; hence, for eight-bit characters, it accesses the symbol font correctly. This would break
the Latin accented characters except for the fact that (most current versions of) the browsers still access characters in the Mac order if
they are specified numerically using the HTML syntax ``&#???;". So TtH documents will in most cases display both accented characters
and symbols correctly on Macs if the document-encoding is set to MacRoman. In addition, NS4.0 has under Edit Preferences Fonts a
choice between ``use document fonts'' and ``use my fonts overriding document''. You need to set ``use document fonts''.
In summary, try setting your browser to View Encoding MacRoman, and Edit
Preferences Fonts Use-document-fonts (NS 4.0).
X font problems
Symbol fonts are not normally enabled for Netscape running under X, because of
the way Netscape groups its fonts. A fix for this is to install some aliases in
the fonts directories or else to add a line to your .Xdefaults file.
See
http://venus.pfc.mit.edu/tth/Xfonts.html.
Other Browser Bugs
Under Wind*ws, both Netscape (3.0) and Internet Explorer (3.02) incorrectly size or space vertically the symbol glyphs so that small gaps
appear between the parts of large symbols and delimiters. This occurs only at certain font sizes (different between the two browsers!)
but causes a slightly annoying degradation of the appearance.
Both Netscape and IE fail (although somewhat differently) to carry font
changing commands from cell to cell of HTML3.2 tables.
IE can become confused about its vertical alignment in tables, with the result that symbols float above or below the horizontal line in
built-up equations. This sometimes fixes itself if you simply refresh the page!