Inspired by this question on Meta: Is the mark to the left of the badges supposed to be a square or a checkmark?

On my FireFox, the "check" mark appears as a box with numbers in it, rather than a tick: alt text

On Meta, they suggested checking your font settings, but I haven't seen anything that looks obviously untoward:
alt text

(I recently changed the encoding to UTF-8, as suggested, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference.)

The other recommendation proffered was to check out the List of Unicode Characters and use it to identify what's missing. The tick is in the "Dingbats" section - as far as I can tell, the only one of that section that my machine is rendering is the aeroplane (2708).

Does anyone know what I can do to fix it?

Margaret

Posted 2009-07-28T00:08:20.750

Reputation: 1 536

According to http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2007/07/15/3890144.aspx (as noted in the comments of http://superuser.com/questions/52671/how-do-i-create-unicode-smilies-like/52686#52686), using Arial Unicode MS does more harm than it solves. It even suggests deleting the font. I'm not on Windows so cannot check.

– Arjan – 2010-03-26T06:36:44.910

At the badges overview, the character has meanwhile been replaced by an image. The test in the other topic (first link in the question) can still be compared to the upmost image in the question above though. Meanwhile Margaret has found the answer on Meta (see below): This can be corrected (in IE at least) by going to Tools, Internet Options, "General" tab, Fonts and select "Arial Unicode MS" as the default font. However, According to Microsoft, the Microsoft Arial MS font is installed with MS Office. I assume the same solution should apply to Firefox, if the font is available. – Arjan – 2009-08-16T09:38:14.570

Yes, selecting Arial Unicode MS as the default font solves this particular issue. Interestingly, though, it was previously set to Time New Roman which supposedly has Unicode characters as well. Also, despite all the machines having Office (2003), several of them did not actually have Arial Unicode - but one did. I'm not sure what the tipping point actually is. – Margaret – 2009-08-20T01:30:31.687

Answers

From https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1861/check-marks-indicating-obtained-badges-use-unicode-10004-symbol-not-available/1879#1879 :

This can be corrected (in IE at least) by going to Tools > Internet Options > "General" tab > Fonts and select "Arial Unicode MS" as the default font.

Margaret

Posted 2009-07-28T00:08:20.750

Reputation: 1 536

– Arjan – 2010-03-26T06:37:34.473

Another comment from that post: According to Microsoft, the Microsoft Arial MS font is installed with MS Office. If available, then the same solution should apply to Firefox in the second image in your question above (replace Arial with Arial Unicode MS). So, did this solve things for you? – Arjan – 2009-08-16T09:34:41.817

The character in that post is this one:

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U+2714 - CHECK MARK, HEAVY

Ensure that you have a font installed that contains that character. If the font does not contain the character, it may be resolved using an alternative font. I'm a little hazy on how this happens and whether it would be done by the operating system or the application. I expect it would be done by the Gecko rendering engine, so upgrading to a newer version of Firefox may fix things.

If you want to reliably write the character in a post, even though you can't view it, write it as a HTML entity:

&#x2714;

(That'll work here because the Markdown editor supports HTML - it is not something that'll work in any text field.)

Note that, although there is an entry in the Mozilla FAQ about symbols/dingbats, it does not apply in this case.

McDowell

Posted 2009-07-28T00:08:20.750

Reputation: 276

Get Dingbats to appear in Firefox 3?

Answers

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