'font-family：Symbol'和Windows-1252

Question

I have a bunch of HTML documents that contain some simple text in Windows-1252 encoding, but throughout the text there are numerous appearances of span elements with font-family: Symbol .

For example:

<span style='font-family:Symbol'>Ñ</span>

Which appears as the greek delta - Δ in the browser.

Google told me that using the Symbol font might show different results on different systems, as it's not actually a well defined font.
Is this really true? Is it "unsafe" to use the Symbol font?

If so, is there any way to reliably convert (on my own system) such symbols in the Symbol font to their Windows-1252 counterparts?

Answer 1

It's been always unsafe to rely on having certain font installed on all the computers/smartphones/gadgets that visit your site. There're some font embedding techniques that work reasonably well in some modern browsers but you'd need to repack the Symbol font and I doubt the copyright owner allows you to do it.

Of course, most characters in the Symbol font are not in the Windows-1252 encoding but that should not be an issue. You can use the following map to obtain the appropriate HTML entities. However, you'll have to write a script or program using a programming language (HTML is just a markup language).

Answer 2

The problem is that the greek letter you see is just the appearance, the actual letter is something completely different.

I can think of two ways to convert it:
1. Write a script (in your language of choice) that converts each letter to it's Greek counterpart. (Ñ => Δ)
2. Take a screenshot of the document/page and use an OCR-program to convert it to Greek text.

Answer 3

When using font-family , if neither of the listed font faces are found on the client, that is without the webfont embeds, may result in changing to default font of client hence a different font replacement for what you'd show to your users.

You may want to use UTF-8 encoding and put the delta (Δ) sign in your HTML content, or use webfont embeds to provide an option, "use the font I want from this".