Posted by Dylan Parry on 10/25/07 19:44

Safalra (Stephen Morley) wrote:

> I think the issue is the browser taking the hyphen character from a
> different font due to it not being available in the desired font. On my
> system, IE6 and IE7 both display the hyphen, and it looks okay in Times New
> Roman, but it sticks to the same hyphen character when I change fonts. For
> me Mozilla also uses a single hyphen character across a range of fonts, but
> one that's short and heavy, and looks very out of place in any of the
> common fonts.

That's interesting. I came to the conclusion that they were using
different hyphens in various fonts, but that was based on me having
tested a serif font and a monospace font, and seeing that the widths of
the hyphens appeared different - not the width of the actual hyphen, but
the space allocated for it. Obviously that was a stupid conclusion to
make as of course the space will be larger on a monospace font, even if
the glyph was from a substitute font!

I do find it strange how something as simple as a hyphen is not included
within common fonts. A quick test using character map shows that the
hyphen is not included in Arial, nor in Times New Roman. It is included
in Calibri and Calmbria though (the Vista "replacements" for the
former), and despite my test pages (for me at least) using Calibri, only
Firefox is using the hyphen glyph in this font.

IE7 appears to be choosing the hyphen glyph from Arial Unicode MS, which
as a larger font causes the display error I experienced.

From these experiments, and reading the replies here, it's obvious that
the hyphen character is simply not ready to be used on the Web, despite
it being such a commonly-used character, and as such I'll have to stick
to the damned hyphen-minus, the illegitimate child of ASCII :)

--
Dylan Parry
http://electricfreedom.org | http://webpageworkshop.co.uk

The opinions stated above are not necessarily representative of
those of my cats. All opinions expressed are entirely your own.

[Back to original message]