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For some reason, in my Firefox 12.0 for Mac OS X, my 〉 (⟩) characters are much larger than they should be. On Chrome and Safari, they look exactly how I want them to be.
I have AddDefaultCharset utf-8 in my .htaccess as well as <meta charset="utf-8"> in my <head> (as the group I'm delivering these files to may not use my .htaccess).
Also, according to Adobe's Browser Lab, IE 7 and 8 just show a square box... is there anyone I can get these browsers to support that character? It would make things a lot easier (as the colors are going to be changing, so images are very inconvenient, and no color fade with images).
Demo: http://cameronspear.com/demos/rang/
This is what I see in Chrome and expect to see:
This is what my Firefox is showing:
This is a screenshot from Browser Labs of IE8:
TL;DR: I want all of these screenshots to look like the first one using 〉 aka ⟩ characters. Use of JavaScript would even be acceptable.
Thanks.
[edit] I should specify that it's not as crucial I have the ⟩ character as I am able to change its color with CSS and have it look the same across multiple browsers.
I just wanted to share exactly what I did for posterity's sake.
Thanks to Pointy's tips and resources, I created my own SVG with Inkscape using the template and methods as described at "How to make your own icon webfont". I mapped a big angle bracket to X and a small one to x.
The one thing I ran into was that my angle needs to touch the baseline and only go about 72% the way to the top of the box to fit "inline," so capital X was my original too-tall one, and lowercase x was the more inline one.
I then converted my SVG to TTF with http://www.freefontconverter.com/ and converted to a webfont with http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator
... and that was it.
The demo (http://cameronspear.com/demos/rang/) is still up. You can see it looks consistent in all the browsers and the onclick rotation animation is dang close to the point, etc.
[Update] I found a great resource called IcoMoon that helps on making fonts and organizing fonts for the web, and it accepts regular svg vectors so you can make it in Illustrator and not mess with Inkscape since IcoMoon handles the keyboard mapping and stuff. You can only export the icons you use, so you only load 3 or 4 icons if that's all you need and not the entire font.
It's become an invaluable resource, and I recommend everyone else wanting to get into Icon Fonts check it out. You can learn more about the entire process from CSS-Trick's 113th Screencast.
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Are you able to use images? They would provide a consistent look across all browsers. In many cases, images are preferable to character symbols.
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Making an icon font is easy enough that I can do it, though (for me) the process is somewhat mysterious. I suspect there are many actual graphic artists who are better at it, and surely many who understand the technical details more than I do.
Here is a pretty thorough blog post on the topic. (Not mny blog.) The main thing it doesn't describe very well is the relationship between the Inkscape "art board" area and the vertical positioning of each glyph in the font. It goes into some detail, but I've just never been able to figure it out.
What I did, therefore, is just make a square artboard 1024 pixels on a side. I then set up a grid in Inkscape so that the art board is divided up into a 16x16 grid. That makes it (somewhat) easy to design characters that will render nicely at a 16px font size. (Of course you could target a different font size, if you want; 16x16 is good for stuff that needs to be pretty small however.) Then, I just make sure that when I put the glyphs on the page, they're in a 1em by 1em box (or 16px by 16px; however you want to do it in your CSS) with no padding. I use <i> tags, and give them display: inline-block. That gives me a lot of flexibility, and it generally works great.
The Inkscape SVG font tool is, to put it mildly, pretty raw. It's literally the result of somebody's summer project. It works, but not much more than barely. Save often.
Now the process for generating the font files is somewhat crazy. I use FontSquirrel. I upload the .svg saved from Inksccape, and then ask for EOT, WOFF, and TTF. Amazingly, it works.
If you just need a few glyphs, this is a pretty sweet way to go, because you'll have a little bitty font file to download and it'll be cached by the browser. There are some accessibility issues however and the practice is sufficiently controversial that some more fanatical members of the community may consider you a barbarian for doing this :-)
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This is a font issue. To maximize the odds of having a rare character (one that is not present in most fonts) rendered properly, specify a maximal list of fonts that all contain it.
The page now has just font-family: Arial,sans-serif set on the span elements that contain the bracket. Since Arial does not contain it, each browser will use its own definition for sans-serif. If the map that it is mapped to does not contain the bracket, clever browsers try something clever, like scanning through other fonts in the system, but this may still result in lack of any glyph for it.
There’s an additional problem. Normally it does not matter that you use entity references like ⟩ instead of the character itself, but here it does. By HTML 4.01, ⟩ means U+232A; by HTML5 drafts, it means U+27E9. IE obeys HTML 4.01 here, whereas Firefox uses the HTML5 definition. So it is better to use the character you really want, either as such in UTF-8 encoding, or as a character reference 〉.
If you can check e.g. the font coverage for U+232A and write the fonts in order of preference. But you should check that all of the fonts give an acceptable presentation. For example, if Cambria Math is used, the default line height will be very large, so you probably want to set line-height explicitly to some reasonable value like 1.3.
Finally—and this should perhaps have been asked very first—do you really want to use RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE BRACKET or MATHEMATICAL RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET? They are brackets, to be used as paired with left angle brackets, not arrow symbols.
Some more info: Guide to using special characters in HTML.
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