Author: sumedhaswamy
Description:
Hello,
The symbol for lower case ρ, when written as <math> \rho </math> is
displayed as : "ϱ", rather than the expected "ρ" on Safari web
browser. The display is fine on Firefox.
Is there a browser specific setting that needs to change ?
Ref : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rho_%28letter%29
Thank you.
Version: unspecified
Severity: minor
OS: Mac OS X 10.4
Platform: Macintosh
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rho_%28letter%29
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Declined | None | T13663 Display of lower case rho as ϱ rather than ρ on Safari Browser | |||
| Resolved | None | T18719 Math hashes should include versioning to allow sensible updates |
Confirmed in Mac OS X 10.4 w/ Safari 2.0.4 (419.3) and WebKit nightly ... I think (About doesn't show the version). 3.0 beta on Windows XP looks fine.
Safari seems to default to 'Times' as its serif font; the browser default 'serif' font face is defined for the 'texhtml' class for <math> renderings.
Poking about in the Unicode character palette, it looks like Apple's "Times" font uses the variant style (with a fancier tail) rather than the straighter tail that most other fonts use.
Overriding the style to use 'Times New Roman' if available should produce the more expected style.
Note that Firefox seems to actually be worse in font selection here, picking the glyph out of some other font entirely which appears to be sans-serif... it just happens to be one with the straight-tail glyph variant. :)
Changing Product: Wikimedia → Mediawiki
Changing Component: WikiBugs → Internationalization
Reason: The wikibugs component is designed for the I.R.C. bot.
The reply i got. I haven't looked further into this yet.
17-Jun-2010 11:58 PM DARIN MARSHALL :
Engineering has provided the following feedback regarding this issue:
This is visual confusion between the small rho (U+03C1) and rho symbol (U+03F1), as opposed to capital RHO (U+03A1). Looking at Times Roman sources, the glyph for small letter rho is shaped like the model on the web for rho symbol http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/03f1/index.htm. Times does not contain a cmap entry for rho symbol btw.
This is expected behavior for the design of Times Roman, which has been around for 80 years. rho and rho symbol are the same letter. Some typefaces choose to distinguish them by use of gothic versus cursive styling. In the case of the font on the web, they use the gothic for small rho (http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/03c1/index.htm) and the cursive form for rho symbol (http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/03f1/index.htm).
Nowadays we either render to PNG or render the LateX as is for text browser. Plus it seems this issue is a font issue. So I am not sure there is any point in keeping this bug open in our tracker.