IE doesn't display special characters properly

[Thomas Off]

Hello!

For one of my projects I have to use special characters like the aleph sign
or the symbol for an empty set. When I put them into my HTML page using the
unicode entities (e.g. ℵ for the aleph sign), Mozilla Firefox and
Opera display the characters correctly, but when viewing the HTML in IE, I
just get a square instead of the correct symbols. Is this a general
restriction in IE or do I have to install any additional
fonts/software/languages or make some special settings? Any hint would be
greatly appreciated!

Regards, Thomas

 

[Andreas Prilop]

For one of my projects I have to use special characters like the aleph sign
or the symbol for an empty set. When I put them into my HTML page using the
unicode entities (e.g. ℵ for the aleph sign),

You should use decimal character references (e.g. ℵ) because
they are more widely supported. Even StarOffice 7 doesn't recognize
hexadecimal character references when importing HTML files!

Mozilla Firefox and
Opera display the characters correctly, but when viewing the HTML in IE, I
just get a square instead of the correct symbols. Is this a general
restriction in IE

Yes, Internet Explorer is broken.

or do I have to install any additional
fonts/software/languages or make some special settings?

You _might_ add "font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS'" which helps IE on
those Windows systems that do have the font Arial Unicode MS.

In addition, I suggest to set the encoding (charset) to UTF-8
for older browsers.
<http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/checklist.html#s6>
<http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/quick#cons>