Unicode special characters appear differently in Firefox vs. Chrome/IE

Question

I\'m trying to find a way to make dingbats appear exactly the same in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE.

I noticed that the Dingbats appear the same in IE/Chrome/Safari

Answer 1

Interesting...On a MacOS X 10.6.6 machine with Firefox 3.6.13 and Chrome 8.0.552.231, the Wikipedia pages do render the first table, the ITC Zapf Dingbats, slightly differently. The effect is most noticeable on the solid half-circle at the bottom left corner of the set of characters.

The main Unicode Dingbats table renders almost the same; Firefox generates boxes containing the 4 hex digits of the missing character for the missing symbols, but Chrome just generates empty boxes - I prefer Firefox's technique.

The browsers must either be using slightly different fonts or slightly different font sizes (though I can't detect a size difference by eye). I've not looked at the HTML that is being rendered.

On the whole, I think that this is within the realm of 'allowable variation' - but I'm not an expert. I suspect you have a world of worry ahead of you if you demand pixel-for-pixel similarity between browsers. The concern should be to get the message across clearly.