I use as font-family stack like this:
body{
font-family: icon, 'Merriweather Sans', ui-sans-serif, sans-serif;
}
with icon being an icon-font that has some symbols in it for example arrows, which can occur in copy text or headlines.
The icon font is loaded like this (simplified example):
#font-face {
font-family: 'icon';
src: url(icon.woff2);
unicode-range: U+1F872, ..., ...;
}
That way whenever the 'arrow bold to right' is used in a text it will be rendered in the icon font. It works well and is foolproof.
I also use (simplified example again)
p.text{
max-width: 70ch;
}
which ensures that text paragraphs don't have too many characters in one line for readability.
Firefox makes those text paragraphs a lot smaller than chrome. And after some experimenting, I found that FF uses the icon-font to determine the width of the zero while Chrome uses Merriweather Sans.
The icon font has no zero-glyph in it and would be hindered by its Unicode range to display one.
So at first glace it seems correct that Chrome calculates ch based on the first font-family in the stack that contains a zero and is allowed to render a zero.
On the other hand I'd think that for calculating the abstract ch unit one can argue that the actual presence ot the zero character isn't necessary. Also it should be perfectly ok if one would use one font only for displaying number (through Unicode-Range) while the next font displays letters. What font should be used for calculating the ch value then?
Can anyone tell me if one or the other browsers does it wrong and the other does it right?
And has anyone an idea for a good workaround?
I'm finding Unicode for special characters from FileFormat.Info's search.
Some characters are rendering as the classic black-and-white glyphs, such as ⚠ (warning sign, \u26A0 or ⚠). These are preferable, since I can apply CSS styles (such as color) to them.
Others are rendering as newer cartoony emoji, such as ⌛ (hourglass, \u231B or ⌛). These are not preferable, since I cannot fully style them.
It appears that the browser is making this change, since I'm able to see the hourglass glyph on Mac Firefox, just not Mac Chrome nor Mac Safari.
Is there a way to force browsers to display the older (flat monotone) versions to display?
Update: It seems (from comments below) there is a text presentation selector, FE0E, available to enforce text-vs-emoji. The selector is concatenated as a suffix without space onto the character's code, such as ⌛︎ for HTML hex or \u231B\uFE0E for JS. However, it is simply not honored by all browsers (eg Chrome and Edge).
Append the Unicode variation selector character for forcing text, VS15, ︎.
This forces the previous character to be rendered as text rather than as an Emoji Symbol.
<p>🔒︎</p>
Result: 🔒︎
Learn more at: Unicode symbol as text or emoji
I had a Unicode character in the content of a span::before, and I had the font-family of the span set to "Segoe UI Symbol". But Chrome used "Segoe UI Emoji" as the font to render it.
However, when I set the font-family to "Segoe UI Symbol" explicitly for the span::before, rather than just for the span, then it worked.
For a CSS-only solution to prevent iOS displaying emojis, you can use font-family: monospace which defaults to the text variant of the glyph rather than the emoji variant:
<p>Normal character: ↩</p>
<p>Monospace character: <span style="font-family: monospace">↩</span></p>
If your primary concern is forcing monochromatic display so the emoji don't stand out from the text too much, CSS filters, either alone or in combination with the Unicode variation selector, may be something you want.
p.gscale {
-webkit-filter: grayscale(100%);
filter: grayscale(100%);
}
a {
color: #999;
-webkit-filter: grayscale(100%) sepia(100%) saturate(400%) hue-rotate(170deg);
filter: grayscale(100%) sepia(100%) saturate(400%) hue-rotate(170deg);
}
<p class="gscale">You've now got emoji display on 🔒lockdown🔒.</p>
<p>External Link: celebrate 🎉</p>
Unlike the variation selector, it shouldn't matter how the emoji are rendered, because CSS filters apply to everything. (I use them to grayscale PNG-format "link type" icons on hyperlinks that have been modified to point to the Wayback Machine.)
Just mind the caveat. You can't override a parent element's filter in a child, so this technique can't be used to grayscale a paragraph, then re-colorize the links within it. 😢
...still, it's useful for situations where you're either going to be making the whole thing a hyperlink or disallowing rich markup within it. (eg. titles and descriptions)
However, this won't work unless CSS actually gets applied, so I'll give a second option which is more reliable in <title> elements than the Unicode variation selector (I'm looking at you GitHub. I don't like fake icons in my browser tabs):
If you're putting a user-provided string into a <title> element, filter out the emoji along with any bold/italic/underline/etc. markup. (Yes, for those who missed it, the standard does call for the contents of <title> to be plain text aside from the ampersand escapes and the browsers I tested all interpret tags within as literal text.)
The two ways I can think of are:
Directly use a manually-maintained regex which matches the blocks where the newest version of Unicode puts its emoji and their modifiers.
Iterate through the grapheme clusters and discard any which contain recognized emoji codepoints. (A grapheme cluster is a base glyph plus all the diacritics and other modifiers which make up the visible character. The example I link to uses Python's regex engine to tokenize and then the emoji package for the database, but Rust is a good example of a language where iterating grapheme clusters is quick and easy via a crate like unicode-segmentation.)
None of the other solutions worked for me but I eventually found something that did courtesy of css-tricks. In my use case, I was adding a link symbol at the end of each markdown header for direct linking to sections within articles but the emoji symbol looked a bit distracting. The following code allowed me to make the emoji look like a plain symbol and then switch back to looking like an emoji when hovered over which was perfect for my use case. If you just want to make the icon look more like a symbol just change the text-shadow hexadecimal color to #000 as shown in the second example.
.direct-link {
color: transparent;
text-shadow: 0 0 #dbe2ec;
}
.direct-link:hover {
color: inherit;
}
<h3>Blog Subheading🔗</h3>
.direct-link {
color: transparent;
text-shadow: 0 0 #000;
}
<h3>Blog Subheading🔗</h3>
Android fonts are not rich as you may expect.
Font files don't have these exotic glyph and Android has a hack for few characters without glyph. They are replaced with icons.
So solution is to integrate the site with a web font (woff).
Create new font file with FontForge and pick required glyph from free serif TTF for example. Every glyph takes 1k. Generate woff file.
Prepare simple CSS to import the custom font family.
style.css:
#font-face {
font-family: 'Exotic Icons';
src: url('exotic-icons.woff') format('woff');
}
.exotic-symbol-font {
position: relative;
top: 1px;
display: inline-block;
font-family: 'Exotic Icons';
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
line-height: 1;
-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
}
index.html file:
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet"></head>
<title>Test custom glyphs</title>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr>
<td class="exotic-symbol-font">
😭 ☠ ♠ a g
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
Google Chrome, desktop version 75, seems to disambiguate its approach to rendering Unicode characters based on the first Unicode escape it encounters while loading a page. For instance, when parsed as the first HTML Unicode escape in a page source, and having no emoji equivalent, ⏷ seems to clarify to Chrome that the page contains escapes not to be rendered as emoji.
Expanding upon ssokolow's answer, using a filter is nice and at least makes the contours visible instead of using a simple font, but converting an RGB color into a sequence of CSS filters is very hard when you want to use a specific color.
A better (although quite wordy) option is to use the <feColorMatrix> SVG filter. Combined with the grayscale filter and the data URI scheme, you can represent the color via RGB and in-line CSS:
.violet {
color: white;
filter: grayscale(100%) url("data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'><filter id='f'><feColorMatrix type='matrix' values='0.78 0 0 0 0 0 0.082 0 0 0 0 0 0.522 0 0 0 0 0 1 0'/></filter></svg>#f");
}
Unfortunately, you cannot interpolate the URL with data (taken from attributes or variables), but at least you don't have to calculate CSS filters from RGB.
My specific version of the problem
My site is using the ◀︎ (BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE) and similar characters in CSS pseudo-elements (::after and ::before) to indicate the current item in a list.
In my tests, I always used the triangle character and the variation selector 15 together. First I was using both a webfont from Google Fonts and a font installed on the device that should both have contained the glyphs for those characters, but for some reason, this assumption must have been wrong. I also tried different subsets on Google Fonts, to no avail: Two of my android devices with Google Chrome and Samsung Internet (Chromium) always rendered the emoji instead of the text glyph.
My solution
My solution was to download the latest WOFF of the Gnu Free Font (which I knew to contain glyphs for those characters), include it in my project, and define it using #font-face:
#font-face {
font-family: "Free Sans";
src: url("/site/static/fonts/FreeFont/FreeSans.woff") format("woff");
}
Then, to set the styles for my pseudo elements:
span.current::after {
font-family: "Free Sans", $universal-font-family ! important;
}
Discussion
I'm not yet sure about the performance impact of using that 786K extra font just for those few characters. If that becomes a problem, it should be possible to use a stripped-down custom font with just those characters instead.
If none of the other answers work for you, it's possible you have one or more of these fonts in your font stack (as was the case for us):
Segoe UI Emoji
Apple Color Emoji
These are included in a number of commonly used font stacks, like the Github font stack if I'm not mistaken.
I dont know of a way to turn off the emoji type rendering. Usually I use an icon font such as font awesome or glyphicons (comes with Bootstrap 3).
The benefit of using these over the unicode characters is that
you can choose from many different styles so it fits the design of your site;
they are consistent across browsers (if you ever tried doing a unicode star character, you'll notice it's different in IE vs other browser);
also, they are fully stylable, like the unicode characters you're trying to use.
The only downside is that its one more thing for the browser to download when they view your page.
For me on OSX the solution was to set font-family to EmojiSymbols
None of the solutions above worked for the "Emoji for Google Chrome" Extension.
So as a workaround I made a screenshot of the Unicode Character 'BALLOT BOX WITH CHECK' (U+2611) and added it as image with php:
$ballotBoxWithCheck='<img src="pics/U2611.png" style="height:11px;margin-bottom:-1px">'; # ☑ or /U2611
See: https://spacetrace.org/man_card.php?tec_id=21&techname=multi-emp-vessel
I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction. I am looking to display the Google Font Orbitron at consistent weights at every given font size. Sounds pretty easy, right? Not in my scenario. At certain font-sizes, some characters have multiple weights within the same character.
Note: I am testing this in Windows 7, Chrome v27
The Code:
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Orbitron:400,500,700,900' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
.sixteen{
font-family: Orbitron;
font-weight: 400;
font-size: 16px;
line-height: 22px;
}
.nineteen{
font-family: Orbitron;
font-weight: 400;
font-size: 19px;
line-height: 22px;
}
<h4 class="sixteen">Home of Front End Developer and</h4>
<h4 class="nineteen">Home of Front End Developer and</h4>
Here is a fiddle to explain my issue. If you take a look at the fiddle, you'll see in the first line that the top line of the uppercase F, E, and D characters have more weight/thickness than the rest of the characters in that line. But as you'll notice on the next line, that
In case you cannot replicate what I'm seeing, here's a screenshot:
My question is two-fold:
What would the best way to technically describe this? 'Multiple font weights in one given character' lacks brevity, and isn't likely to have any valuable Google results.
Is there a way to fix this and make the weight consistent in every character at every font-size?
What you describe is as such just variation of the visible width of strokes in glyphs, or stroke width variation to put it briefly. Such variation is normal in serif fonts and also appears, at least to some extent, in many sans-serif fonts. However, in this case, the font is designed to have a rather constant stroke width, so the visible effect is caused by font rendering differences.
There is no way to remove the font rendering differences. Font rendering is a complex issue, and although some proposed or experimental CSS settings might affect some aspects of it, it’s basically outside your control. For example, font smoothing (also known as anti-aliasing) depends on the operating system and its settings as well as the browser and its settings.
I've found this issue with a bunch of fonts used online when you go down to a certain size. It's the way the font is being anti-aliased.
You can see the same issue from Google showing off that font: http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Orbitron
I have the websafe font georgia that is beuatifull for what I want.
The only problem I am having is that the bottom of the font doesn't line up.
http://jsfiddle.net/JW7F8/
<style>
.georgia {
font-family:georgia;
font-size:1.9em;
}
</style>
<span class="georgia">
1234567890
</span>
As you can see in the fiddle is that the 1,2,6 and 8 all start a bit higher than the rest.
The question:
How can I render georgia that it all starts on one line whilst still being able to set the site with XXem.
I do not mind:
splitting up the string
setting different classes
I just need a workable solution that still allows for dynamic sizing.
This is just the style of the font, technically all the font characters line up (if you highlight the text it will show the height of the font character).
You won't be able to consistently line up Georgia font even by splitting the font because the offset will have to vary depending on font size. This could be possible using em's, but it would be hacky at least, and would be very difficult to get working consistently cross browser.
Also, changing the font position will cause Kerning issues.
However, there is another similar font which Georgia was influenced from, which does line up:
Georgia incorporates influences from Clarendon-style typefaces
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarendon_(typeface)
For a websafe solution I ended up implementing this: http://jsfiddle.net/JW7F8/2/
<style>
.georgia {
font-family:georgia;
font-size:1.9em;
}
.subitx {
position:relative;
top:0.18em;
}
.subity {
position:relative;
top:0.13em;
font-size:1.2em
}
</style>
<span class="georgia">
<span class="subity">1</span><span class="subity">2</span>345<span class="subitx">6</span>7<span class="subitx">8</span>9<span class="subity">0</span>
</span>
Only shame is the fonts that are sized up are bolder than the rest.
I really wish there were more web safe fonts that work cross browser... sigh
The Georgia font has old-style digits, i.e. digits that vary in height and may extend below the baseline too.
Most fonts that people use on web page have modern-style “lining” digits, all digits being of equal height, roughly the same as uppercase letters.
Some fonts contain both. It has relatively recently become possible to choose between such alternatives in CSS, in several browsers, using font-feature-settings. But Georgia has only old-style digits.
It is best to choose a different font if you think that such a fundamental feature is not suitable for your text.
However, on WebKit browsers (Chrome, Safari), using #font-face (for local fonts, not embedded) and unicode-range, you could specify that digits be taken from another font. It’s technically simple but not really a good idea:
#font-face {
font-family: Georgiax;
src: local("Times New Roman");
unicode-range: U+30-39;
}
#font-face {
font-family: Georgiax;
src: local("Georgia");
unicode-range: U+0-29, U+40-10FFFF;
}
Then you would just use font-family: Georgiax as if it were a real font family. But as said, this technique is not supported by other than WebKit browsers, and taking digits from another font means a typographic blunder.
P.S. Georgia is not web-safe. No font is. You won’t find it on an Android, for example.
It is very common issue with font-face, e.g.
font: 20px/20px 'ITC Avant Garde Gothic Std'; font-style: 'book'; letter-spacing: 1px; text-transform: uppercase;
The problem is that I'd expect text vertically centered. However, it is not. Is there a way to offset the line-height base line? Without actually changing the line-height.
The phenomenon depends on the font. It is up to the font designer to decide how the font uses its height. For example in Arial, when set solid, uppercase basic Latin letters are vertically centered, whereas in Verdana, they appear a bit lower (i.e., a little more space above than below).
You can fine-tune this by using relative positioning, but you then need extra markup, e.g.
<div><span>text</span></div>
with CSS for the span setting, say,
position: relative;
top: 2px;
This may cause nasty effects if the font used in the user’s browser is different from your expectations.
I did not consider the possible effect of font-style: 'book', as I have no idea of what it might mean. No CSS resource I know mentions anything like that (the font-style values are unquoted keywords and do not inlcude book).