Unicode issue: certain characters not displaying - unicode

I am having some issues in trying to get certain unicode characters to show up when trying to type. It seems that no matter what I do I can't get them to appear outside of certain specific places.
The two characters that I am trying to get show up are:
𛀀 and 𛀁
The Japanese archaic katakana e and Japanese archaic hiragana ye. In unicode they are in the Kana Supplement block.
You can find them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana_Supplement
I can't seem to get these characters to show up outside of these instances:
In firefox when hardware acceleration disabled (and only when it is disabled)
This webpage: http://www.akenotsuki.com/eyeben/font/unicode.html
The second webpage works even when hardware acceleration in firefox is enabled.
Here's what I've tried to do to resolve the issue:
Installing & reinstalling proper fonts
Rebooting the computer
Clearing the font cache
Setting the system locale to Japanese (hey, it was worth a shot)
None of which has worked. Can someone please help me? I want to get this to resolve itself especially because I want to be able to use this in Photoshop.

Related

List of well supported unicode characters

Is there a list somewhere of which unicode characters are well supported? I.e. if I used these characters in an application or on a web page, there's a good chance that the user will see what I see, and not a question mark or a square.
http://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode This is a good start. This shows what a number of unicode characters look like on several common platforms. But this list is limited to emoji. I'm more interested in things like arrows and mathematical symbols.
Of course, I can always see which characters look good on my computer, phone, web browser, favorite font, etc. But I want to know what will work well for most other people, too.
If you need to know if a Unicode character is assigned you should check the official Unicode Chart.
Wikipedia has a good list of fonts which cover the most characters. See Unicode Font # List of Unicode fonts.
Arial is preinstalled on almost every machine and covers a lot of characters. Not to forget Noto from Google - a font collection which covers almost every character you will ever come in touch with.
For a fast lookup of Unicode characters I recommend Fileformat.info.
But I want to know what will work well for most other people, too.
I would go with Arial, or Times New Roman, or make your decision platform dependent.

UTF-8 special characters don't show up

I'm trying to figure out why characters like this : 👉 show up like empty boxes. They are unicode characters though and charset is utf-8.
Can it be a font problem which doesn't have a glyph for that? Any ideas?
Details: Html page, i use firefox 16.0.1, Windows 7.. Page like on this post i dont see this glyph either
Thanks
The character which you've there is the Unicode Character 'WHITE RIGHT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX' (U+1F449). On that page, you can find a list of known fonts supporting the character behind the link Fonts that support U+1F449.
Font
LastResort
Segoe UI Emoji
Segoe UI Symbol
Symbola
Neither of those fonts is been used here on stackoverflow.com, so you'll also see an empty box.
If this occurs on your own website, and you'd like to fix it, then you'd need to supply a supporting font along with the webapp by CSS #font-face, or in this particular case perhaps better, look for a CSS based icon library such as Font Awesome. The <i class="fa fa-hand-o-right"> comes very close with this character.
The character U+1F449 was added to Unicode in version 6 in 2010, and it generally takes about ten years from the adoption of a character into Unicode before it is widely supported in fonts.
The few fonts that contain it now include Symbola and Segoe UI Symbol. If you have either of them installed, you’ll probably see it; otherwise not. Segoe UI Symbol is shipped with Windows 8 and apparently with (at least some variants of) Windows 7, though the Windows 7 version may be limited – an update is available from Microsoft. Symbola is a free font, so you could in principle use it as a downloadable font (via #font-face), but its file size is rather large.
Web browsers are supposed to use fallback fonts, if the fonts specified for an element do not contain a glyph for some character in the content. Firefox generally implements this will, IE does not, especially in older versions, so if you use the character on a web page, it is best to wrap in an element of its own (usually span is used for the purpose) and set the following on it in CSS:
font-family: Segoe UI Symbol, Symbola;
But this will as such (without #font-face) work only for people using computers that contain one of the fonts.
Missing font characters will usually be substituted with other fonts, and UTF-8 should be able to display all unicode characters. I suspect that the encoding of your file (how it is saved by your editor), does not match the declaration in the meta tags of your HTML page.
You can check your page with this W3-checker, it can possibly give you hints about the problem of your page.
EDIT:
You are right, it's not an encoding problem, the number of the character has such a high number, that the "normal" fonts do not support it. Maybe you can use one of those ☛ ☞, otherwise you would have to use a web font, and fonts with full unicode support can be quite large.

How to display emoji char in HTML

I saved the face "savouring delicious food emoji" to database, and read it in php json_encode which show "uD83D\uDE0B"。 but usually we use one <img /> label to replace it .
however,usually I just find this format '\uE056' not "uD83D\uDE0B",to replace with pic E056.png .
I don't know how to get the pic accroding to 'uD83D\uDE0B'.someone know ?
What the relation between 'uD83D\uDE0B' and '\uE056', they both represent emoji "savouring delicious food"?
The Unicode character U+1F60B FACE SAVOURING DELICIOUS FOOD is a so-called Plane 1 character, which means that its UTF-16 encoded form consists of two 16-bit code units, namely 0xD83D 0xDE0B. Generally, Plane 1 characters cause considerable problems because many programs are not prepared to deal with them, and few fonts contain them.
According to http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f60b/fontsupport.htm this particular character only exists in DejaVu fonts and in Symbola, but the versions of DejaVu I’m using don’t contain it.
Instead of dealing with the problems of encodings (which are not that difficult, but require extra information), you can use the character reference 😈 in HTML. But this does not solve the font problem. I don’t know about iPhone fonts, but in general in web browsing, the odds of a computer having any font capable of rendering the character are probably less than 1%. So you may need to use downloadable fonts. Using an image is obviously much simpler and mostly more reliable.
U+E056 is a Private Use codepoint, which means that anybody can make an agreement about its meaning with his brother or with himself, without asking anyone else’s mind. A font designer may assign any glyph to it.
IMPORTANT: As of this posting, the only browser that doesn't automatically support emojis is chrome.
FOR CHROME:
Depending on what server side language you are using, you should be able to find a library that converts emojis for you. I recently needed to solve this issue with php and used this library:
https://github.com/iamcal/php-emoji
The creator essentially created a sprite and adjusts the css according to the unicode of the emoji. It isnt pretty, but luckily he/she did all the grunt work for you. If you're using a different language you should be able to find something similar.
how do I put those little boxes into a php file?
Same way as any other Unicode character. Just paste them and make sure you're saving the PHP file and serving the PHP page as UTF-8.
When I put it into a php file, it turns into question marks and what not
Then you have an encoding problem. Work it out with Unicode characters you can actually see properly first, for example ąαд™日本, before worrying about the emoji.
Your PHP file should be saved as UTF-8; the page it produces should be served as Content-Type: text/html;charset:UTF-8 (or with similar meta tag); the MySQL database should be using a UTF-8 collation to store data and PHP should be talking to MySQL using UTF-8.
However. Even handling everything correctly like this, PCs will still not show the emoji. That's because:
they don't have fonts that include shapes for those characters, and
emoji are still completely unstandardised. Those characters you posted are in the Unicode Private Use Area, which means they don't have any official meaning at all.
Each network in Japan uses different character codes for their emoji, mapped to different areas in the PUA. So even on another mobile phone, it probably won't display the correct character, unless you spend ages manually converting emoji codes for different networks. I'm guessing the ones you posted above are from SoftBank (iPhone?).
There is an ongoing proposal led by Google and Apple to collate the different networks' emoji and give them a proper standardised place in Unicode. Until then, getting emoji to display consistently across networks is an exercise in unhappiness. See the character overview from the standardisation work to see how much converting you would have to do.
God, I hate emoji. All that pain for such a load of useless twee rubbish.

How to use unicode chars in a web with a reliable rendering

I'm using unicode symbols in a web as graphic components.
I need to trust in the way this unicode characters are rendered.
Here there is a simplified example of what I'm trying to build.
You can see that the unicode characters are rendering different in different computers.
Chrome under OSX:
Chrome under Windows:
I only need to support modern browsers so #font-face and google fonts are allowed.
Updated
I know the problem is that the chosen font has not the special characters and finding one with them and compatible with #font-face or googlefonts will be the solution but this is the real problem: how to find a font with this characteristics.
The most likely answer is that your selected font has no glyphs defined for those unicode code-points (and from perusing the font, that seems to be the case) and you will need to switch to a font that has glyphs defined for those code-points.
When a font has no defined glyph for a Unicode code-point, it's up to the platform to figure out how to handle it. Windows used to simply show a square box for anything that wasn't defined, but since Windows Vista (or maybe Windows 7), it will now display a glyph from the system default font, if that's available. What you are most likely seeing for your unicode characters are the versions from the system default fonts - which, of course, are not the same on Windows and Mac.
You should try and find a font that a) contains all the characters you need, b) can be legally used as a downloadable font via #font-face.
You are now using the Fedoka One font, but it contains a very limited character repertoire. The first four characters that you are trying to show are not there (not even “⋕”, since it is quite distinct from the Ascii character “#” despite visual similarity). Since the font-family rule next specifies fantasy, browsers will try whatever fancy font they have been set to use as a generic fantasy font, and it probably hasn’t got them either—fantasy fonts tend to have a limited repertoire. Browsers then go their own ways, possibly using various fonts.
Those four characters are rare in fonts, and the fonts containing them have no similarity with Fedoka One in style. So you may need to reconsider the approach.
Some notes on using special characters in HTML: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/characters.html

how do I specify a system font that handles wide characters on the iphone?

This is sort of a generic question due to my lack of experience with fonts, so a little patience and/or pointing in the right direction to get more info would be appreciated. I have an iphone app and am noticing that when I print some text on my labels, I end up with garbage when the string contains non-ascii, like Korean for example.
My guess is that since my UILabels, for instance, are using the system font, perhaps the system font does not support displaying wide characters. However, I'm left with a few beginner questions:
1) How do I set the system font so my iphone sdk objects that use the system font use it?
2) Does this sound correct that the system font probably doesn't support wide characters and is the reason I see garbage when I have characters out of the normal ascii range?
Thanks. Let me know if I need to clarify the problem please.
Update:
I later suspected maybe it was a problem on my server end so posted this related but not identical post here: does google app engine display unicode differently in StringProperty v StringListProperty objs?
It turns out the problem was not with the font, but with improperly encoding the data response from the server into Ascii when I should have used UTF8. It appears the font supported unicode to begin with.