Comments on: Internet Explorer Makes Me ☹

By: Julian

Julian — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:47:17 +0000

There may be another workaround, but I haven't tested it.

Not for you (the web-site owner), but for the 80-odd percent of the Internet users who are clueless noobs.

I figure if you can get an updated copy of the Arial font that includes all the relevant Unicode characters, the problem will effectively go away.

Then, I found that there is such a font already exists. It is included with late versions of Microsoft Office, but it is not recommended for day-to-day use because of its size (22 MB).

If I could work out how to substitute that font for C:\Windows\Font\Arial.ttf, it would either fix this relatively trivial problem, slow down my computer immensely, or destroy my Windows installation. Hmmm, maybe I will hold off on this experiment until I have a Windows installation I don't mind trashing. (You may insert your own cynical comment about what percentage of Windows installations that might include, right here.)

By: alastair

alastair — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:47:17 +0000

Nice find, Julian.

The font installs as described by the knowledgebase article you pointed to. This installs an "Arial Unicode MS" font in addition to the standard Arial font. So I see why you would want to experiment with substituting this font for the standard Arial font: to fix IE.

Fortunately I can verity that merely installing this font fixes the character glyph problems (including the WHITE FROWNING FACE) in Firefox.

I should mention that another fix might be to install the shareware Code2000 unicode font. This might be a more economical option than purchasing Microsoft Word if you don't already have it.

By: Sunny Kalsi

Sunny Kalsi — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:47:17 +0000

Hmm… I remember downloading Arial MS from the internets (for use in Linux, because I didn’t have enough unicode fonts), and I think it may have been on a “microsoft knowledge” type base site somewhere. Something I noticed was that Arial was by far the most complete unicode font they had (at least, it was the largest to download). I think this is why IE does the Arial trick, because it thinks of Arial MS as the “one font to rule them all”.

By: alastair

alastair — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:47:17 +0000

Sunny, you may be thinking of the Microsoft TrueType core fonts from the Web? This included some really nice fonts, including Trebuchet and Verdana, two of my faves. It also includes Arial, but I'm pretty sure it is an earlier version. The new Arial is 22MB, whereas the one available for download is in a 500K .exe (I can't be arsed downloading to see the extracted size, but I'm guessing less than 22MB).

The "one font to rule them all" idea sounds great (or at least acceptable) - if it worked. As I mentioned above, you end up with both Arial and Arial MS Unicode.

Interestingly, Microsoft no longer hosts downloads of these fonts from their site. However they are still widely available thanks to a non-restrictive license, at least that's what it claims on the sourceforge page.

By: Wade

Wade — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:47:17 +0000

You can learn more about font fallback & linking here: http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/getwr/steps/wrg_font.mspx