Yep, that's true. You're quite right.
Firefox 2 didn't display those fonts (symbol, wingdings etc) natively, but needed a patch, as described (with a few missing backslashes) in http://nothing.golddave.com/?p=53
However, in Firefox 3 this doesn't work anymore, as told in http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=fi&forumId=1&comments_parentId=64810 and http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=lt&forumId=1&comments_parentId=422755
So:
- either change all 'scientific documents' to using Unicode in stead of typical Windows character sets (with the added advantage they can be read on non-Windows OS'es like Mac OS X and Linux and the iPhone OS, that's being used on your iPad)
- or distribute them in pdf-format
- or stick to html with a Windows character set, but then stick to Internet Explorer also for viewing them
A nice example of vendor lock-in, isn't it?
Unicode seems the best way to go. It's standard, it's open and it's well supported.
Did you try Chrome, Opera and Safari on Windows? One of them might just work, as they have a totally different code base. I don't have them installed, so I can't.
And did you try them on Linux? I can't either.
Kees
I am a scientific user of Firefox since firefox 1.0 but today I can't use Firefox 3.5 or 3.6 because this browser is not able to understand symbol font and this is a very dramatic problem for scientific documents as symbol font is frequently used for many equations and many parameters are internationally defined as greek symbol.
Firefox 1 and 2 where used by most students, but now with Firefox 3 we have a very dramatic problem as greek symbols are not available and are replaced by any other font and equations are false and not understanded by students. The Mozilla foundation did not answer to this problem. So my question is how to obliged the Firefox team to correct this problem.
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