Last modified: 2011-11-30 19:46:09 UTC
HTML liberal mode should output corresponding Unicode entities, e.g. \mapsto => ↦ (currently approximated with →)
Googling for something semi-related coincidentally came up with a nice list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fropuff/Symbols However, unless such symbols are supported in fonts like Arial and Verdana that users are likely to have as defaults, we might not want to be quite that liberal. Neither one includes U+21A6 ↦, for instance, but both contain U+2192 →. See http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/arial/blockview.htm?block=mathematical_operators http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/verdana/blockview.htm?block=mathematical_operators We could, however, just add a warning to the option saying that either good default fonts or a decent browser is necessary for the option to work correctly.
The browser should use a generic font when the default font does not contain the character requested. This is browser QoI. (I admit that the glyph used for ↦ on my system is way too narrow, much narrower that →, but I would rather not compensate for this---HTML is for communicating, not for typesetting anyway).
(In reply to comment #2) > The browser should use a generic font when the default font does not contain > the character requested. This is browser QoI. That doesn't mean we can ignore the fact that IE6 doesn't. (I don't know about IE7 offhand.)
Try <span style="font-family:MS Serif">A↦B</span > No problem in IE7.
Too fragile in existing browsers/fonts.
We're phasing the mixed-HTML mode of texvc out in MediaWiki 1.19's Math extension; inline text forms will end up replaced by renderings via MathJax (bug 31406 & friends) -- MathJax is better maintained and does much, much better job than texvc's HTML rendering mode! Going ahead and closing out this bug.
MathJax uses Javascript and this will not work in browsers that do not run scripts (e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows Server). This does not mean that we should not use MathJax but it means that we should give fallback content within the page and replace it from within the script.