I'd ask about spades, clubs, and diamonds too, but nobody uses those.

[packbat]

Question: does anyone know why every version of Firefox on Mac OsX 10.3.9 renders the little "hearts" symbol (♥) as a vertical line?

Edit: Apparently for the same reason the text gets grainy sometimes - the rendering code is flaky. There's a fix promised in Firefox 3. Thanks, baxil!

Comments

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Is it in all typefaces, or just the default one? Do other UAs do it too? Have you tried unicode entity references? Is BSD on PPC just a bizarre creature that doesn't really deserve its apparent popularity?

[packbat.livejournal.com]

All typefaces, neither Safari nor Internet Explorer (nor, oddly, "View Selection Source" or the select-right-click dropdown menu in Firefox) have that problem, I haven't tested using Unicode entity references (either #x2665 = ♥ or #9829 = ♥), and I am not guru enough to judge. Oh, and on Wikipedia's character entity reference page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references), spades and diamonds are thick and thin horizontals, respectively, and hearts and clubs are thick and thin verticals.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I have no idea, but was kinda wondering about it. It only started after I updated Firefox a while back, though. I think. Or maybe it was an OS X update... Now I'm not sure.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Hmmm ... now that you mention it, I do have a vague recollection of some old version of [OSX &] Firefox not showing this flaw. It started happening for me months if not years ago, though.

data point

[baxil.livejournal.com]

Firefox on Mac OS 10.4.11 does it as well (including the Unicode entity references in comments). Safari has no problem, either on OS 10.4 or 10.3.

Re: data point

[baxil.livejournal.com]

Here is the actual bug in Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=212745). Code-level workaround: Add <tt></tt> tags around the code --> ♥. Useragent-level workaround: it *may* work for you to change some of the fonts used to render other languages; see comments on the linked page.

Also, a little Googling revealed that there are some other text display bugs for Mac OS X Firefox that have been annoying people for some time: http://danwarne.com/text-rendering-problem-on-firefox-for-mac/ among them. Apparently Firefox 3, when it comes out, will change the rendering engine and fix a lot of these in one fell swoop.

Re: data point

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Ahh ... excellent. I thought it might be a known bug - thanks!