[thelist] Netscape 7 font/special character bug?

Tue Mar 4 07:36:02 CST 2003

Help!  I've searched high and low, and can't find anything in any
Mozilla or Netscape development www sites or other discussion groups
commenting on what must be a very common problem!

I'm working on transferring a large 500+page scientific book into
HTML.  I have scanned and formatted this book in MS Word X format
(unfortunately) - and it includes thousands of
scientific/mathematical formula in Greek font (generally generated as
symbols inserted by Word [I believe in the Symbols font format].)

However, while the HTML (& XHTML) generated by any version of MS Word
(Word98 Mac, Word 2K WinME, or WordX OSX, and for that matter, the
HTML created by Adobe products such as Indesign or Dreamweaver MX),
the representation of these Greek characters work fine with prior
versions of Netscape (4 and 3), and they work with all old and new
version of MS Explorer.

BUT - It breaks (showing just the default English font) with Netscape
7 (and Mozilla and Safari), no matter what platform (I've tested it
with Mac OS 9.2.2, Mac OSX, Win ME, and Win MX.  (While working fine
on Explorer in all of these platforms.)

If anyone has ANY idea of what is going on please toss this sad
starving dog a bone.  Even simply knowing this is a known problem to
be fixed in the future will solve my problems.  If it is, however,
the typical monopolistic game playing by Microsoft  in their
insipidly evil attempts to control the Wide Webbed World by co-opting
standards, well... any idea of how I might fix the problem some
script inserted/replaced code would be appreciated.  I have thousands
of instances of dozens of different characters, and fixing things by
hand is an impossibility.  (I've also run out of ideas of what I
might cut and paste the formatted Word doc text into to report into
HTML via a different wyswyg HTML editor.)

(By the way, another inane thing the HTML generating engine of MS
products such as Word do is generate a different graphic file for
every graphic in the document, even if they are identical.  I had to
use graphics for some characters, and thus I have an HTML document
with thousands of tiny, individually repeated identical images.  I am
going to have to fix this bs by hand...)

Mark.
emdls at pacbell.net

ps: An example of the failed HTML is:

<HTML> <body lang="EN-US"> 
stÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ The letter displayed
should NOT appear as an 's', but should be the greek character
'SIGMA', which looks like a b fallen forward. </div></body>

(The tag should show as the first character the Greek symbol SIGMA
(with the subscript r), but instead in Netscape 7 (and Safari, etc.)
shows up as 's'.  The same happens for other Greek font encoded
symbols.)