Symbol Font Considered Harmful

[Mike Starr]

Thank you for an insightful discussion. I've been using the unicode versions 
of these symbols for many years but I'll certainly think twice before 
actually inserting anything from the Symbol font (something I typically only 
resort to for bullets or the like).

Mike
--
Mike Starr                            WriteStarr Information Services
Technical Writer   -   Online Help Developer   -    Website developer
Graphic Designer    -    Desktop Publisher   -       MS Office Expert
Phone: (262) 694-1028 - Tollfree: (877) 892-1028 - Fax:(262) 697-6334
Email: mike at writestarr.com      -      Web: http://www.writestarr.com

----- Original Message -----
Message: 32
Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2006 18:17:19 -0800
From: "Andrew Warren" <awarren at synaptics.com>
Subject: Symbol Font Considered Harmful

I have a point, but I need about three paragraphs of setup before I can
make it.  Fortunately, the rest of this post is so long that by the time
you're done, you'll hardly remember that you had to wade through this
intro:

<snip>
I no longer approve documents that use the Symbol font for any purpose.
I now insist that "micro-" be either spelled out or represented by the
lowercase "u", and "ohm" either gets spelled out or omitted ("4.7k
resistor" or "4k7 resistor" are both well-understood in my industry to
mean "4.7 kiloohm resistor").

Every once in a while, someone actually needs a real "micro" or "ohm"
symbol in his document.  In those cases, I'm okay -- barely -- with the
use of Unicode "micro" (U+00B5, ALT-0181) and "ohm" (U+2126, ALT-8486)
or "omega" (U+03A9, ALT-0937) characters from whatever regular font he's
using.

Of course, when those Unicode characters get stripped by an ASCII-only
email system or the document's converted to a font that doesn't contain
those Unicode glyphs, the symbols will still disappear or be converted
to an ampersand or a copyright symbol or a little black box with a
question mark in it or something... But at least they won't masquerade
as reasonable-but-totally-wrong characters that are going to cost my
company a ton of money or injure someone.

-Andrew

=== Andrew Warren  - awarren at synaptics.com
=== Synaptics, Inc - Santa Clara, CA