Symbola font not working in web browsers in Snow Leopard

Yes, except when nothing is specified, the WWW browser has to pick something. You are correct that my sample page specifies Helvetica Neue explicitly. However when i use Developer Tools in Safari and Firefox to switch that off—simulating the page not declaring a font—the correct characters still fail to show up. Somehow Tiger is correctly falling back to Symbola—every WWW browser in Tiger which i try—and Snow Leopard is not doing this. Firefox is showing Times Roman as the font when i disable the page’s font declaration with its developer tools.

Once again, over in Tiger, all i did was install Symbola. I did not have to set it in any WWW browser there. It just worked™. That’s not happening in Snow Leopard. I’m trying to understand why, and what to do about it.

Thanks for your point, Kurt. It didn’t answer my question though it forced me to consider what the page was declaring (which i knew about but was neglecting).

The original site is down. Here’s the Wayback Machine link to the 7.21 version of the file:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150602220518/http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Symbol a.zip

Just did a sanity fact check on one of the working Tiger systems:

* No special settings in any WWW browser: their fonts are at their defaults. They correctly find their way to Symbola in /Library/Fonts for that first column of the reference page. TenFour Fox (a fork of the most recent Firefox ESR)’s developer panel is showing Symbola on the system as the active font for that first column, whereas the failing 10.6 Systems are defaulting back to the browser’s own default rather than looking for a font which can handle the glyphs. I know there is or was a mechanism for software to fall back to a font with a wide range of Unicode glyphs, but i do not know the specifics nor how it may have changed between Tiger and Snow Leopard.

* Helvetica Neue does exist on the Tiger system and is active per Font Book, thus per what the page says, would be selected—if it had the needed glyphs. However:

- Different (older) version

- Located in /Library/Fonts next to many others, including Symbola, rather than /System/Library/Fonts as on Snow Leopard

Browsers don't look for fonts that aren't declared. I don't know yet what Safari of Firefox is doing uner Tiger, but they can't decide for themselves what font to use. Certainly not "look" for emojis since they can't "see" what any glyph in any font looks like. To a computer, it's just a font name that's called, and what ordinal or Unicode glyph position of that font to display.

Yes, it’s a number—i did not explain myself well. For example on the page i cite above, the first entry is Unicode code point 1F601, known to us humans (but not the WWW browser software nor the OS code) as “grinning face with smiling eyes”. The HTML source has the UTF-8 encoding (presumably \xF0\x9F\x98\x81 but i have no easy way to see that) as the first entry in that first table.

My understanding of how things work is this:

1) Browser looks for 1F601 in the fonts specified by the web page (unless overridden by the user), in the usual order for selecting between fonts in CSS and HTML. If the page does not specify, it uses its defaults in its Preferences.

If it finds the glyph, it stops. Otherwise:

2) Browser somehow communicates with the font infrastructure of the OS. Some part of the font infrastructure “knows” which fonts have which glyphs available: same mechanism that Character Viewer uses to decide what gets listed in Collections: Containing selected character i am guessing. Somehow, the browser is connected with the glyph it needs and renders it, even from fonts not listed in the CSS (or HTML), and certainly not from the browser default fonts.

This is how it works in reality in Tiger: i can see it. I had the placeholder boxes in every browser until i installed Symbola in /Library/Fonts (using Font Book), at which point BAM!—every WWW browser on the system immediately (on next launch or after a logout or restart—i don’t recall which) displayed the correct glyphs from Symbola, without the web page changing and without me having touched any WWW browser preferences. That has to be an OS-level font function, it seems to me.

This is my expectation for Snow Leopard, and for some reason it’s not happening. Trying to a) understand it, b) fix it. Thanks to everyone helping me towards this goal.

Have you tried another emoji font, like the Noto version?

Thanks for the idea—didn’t know about Noto.

Just tried it: same result: Noto is good in Font Book, available in TextEdit and Character Viewer, and not activating in any WWW browser. (And in my opinion its emojis are ugly.)

Have you tried setting Firefox to use your local symbola font?

I feel i shouldn’t have to do this, because it’s not necessary in Tiger. However for the purposes of troubleshooting i did so, with the following results:

Firefox 40.0.3: manually setting Default font to either Symbola or Noto produces the correct glyphs from those fonts.

Safari 5.1.10: manually setting Default font to either Symbola or Noto produces no change: the glyphs are still missing (the missing glyph box)

WhiteHat Aviator 37.0.2062.99: manually setting Default font to either Symbola or Noto produces no change: the glyphs are still missing (the missing glyph box)

I normally, preferentially use Safari. This works great in Safari 4.1.3 in OS 10.4.11 on my PowerBook G4, no WWW browser settings changes needed. Still trying to wrap my head around what may have changed such that it no longer works in Snow Leopard.

Deactivated Symbola (and verified that it was inactive in Character Viewer). Noto still active. No change: still the missing character boxes in that first column of the sample web page.

Just to note off the top. The two fonts in that set have exactly the same internal names. Which means they conflict with each other. You can't have both enabled at the same time. The internal names of one or the other would have to be changed, and the font regenerated.

You’ve lost me with “two fonts in that set”. I do understand about internal names and font conflicts. If you mean the two versions of Symbola at the link i provided, the instructions—which used to be on the live site but i can’t find—explain to use either the Symbola_hinted.ttf or Symbola.ttf. I’m using Symbola_hinted.ttf. I apologize if i’m misunderstanding you.

However, it's pretty obvious from the glyph I highlighted that is in the Symbola font, that it's not any kind of musical notation. Nor are many of the others from that font which appear in the section under Musical Symbols. That's just where the font's creator put them. So as far as the OS or any app "knowing" where to look is at the mercy of the font's creator putting things where they're supposed to be.

I could create a very simple font that contains nothing but upper and lower case letters, numbers, and standard punctuation. But being a complete idiot, I put them all in the wrong positions. So if I have the letter c where R is supposed to be, you'll get c no matter how many times you press Shift+r. The computer doesn't know what an R looks like, much less what an R is, so it can't "look" for the glyph you're supposed to get.

Absolutely understood.

What’s weird to me is that in my Character Viewer on Snow Leopard, i have a whole bunch of characters from 1D165 onward which are still musical characters, all the way to 1D200 where we get into Ancient Greek Musical Notation. The glyph you selected i eventually found up above at 1D02B: Byzantine Musical Symbol Synagma Meta Stavrou, in the Byzantine Musical Symbols block starting at 1D000. To me, this looks like a bug in Character Viewer for whichever OS X version you’re using.

How is Tiger managing to show you what you expect? I have no idea, because it shouldn't.

My failing is not having a perfect memory of all Apple technologies, nor their names. I’m going to call this “magic” ability “Gimme a Unicode glyph, bro”. If there was no mechanism in place, i agree that there is absolutely no way that any web browser software would look beyond what the page dictates and its own settings (whether or not there’s a UI for them). I have a very strong memory of a service in the OS related to fonts which can look through whatever fonts that service knows about (probably the database Font Book is using or something related) and find a font with the needed glyph—a fallback mechanism. I really don’t think Tiger OS and Tiger Safari and TenFour Fox on Tiger are accidentally finding Symbola when displaying the sample page, and i know for an absolute fact that no preferences have been adjusted in those browsers.