Mathematical constants and computations, by Xavier Gourdon and Pascal Sebah

[ijabbott]

(10-05-2018 07:58 PM)Thomas Okken Wrote:  

(10-05-2018 06:57 PM)ijabbott Wrote:  The formulae look broken due to use of the old Symbol font, which has its own, peculiar character encoding. The whole site would probably need an overhaul to be more compatible with modern browsers.

Taking a look at http://numbers.computation.free.fr/Constants/Pi/pi.html I do indeed see p instead of π, and in the HTML, there is <FONT face=symbol>p</FONT>. I wonder why that doesn't render as intended, though, because the Symbol font is present on my computer. When I select it in MS Word, and type a lowercase p, I see a lowercase π, as expected. Why does that work in Word but not in the browser?

On my Linux machine, "symbol" gets matched to the "OpenSymbol" font. It has the Greek characters and various symbols, but at the standard, Unicode code points. It doesn't have any glyphs at the ASCII (roman) letter code points (where the Adobe "Symbol" font puts the Greek characters), so p gets displayed as p by the Chrome and Firefox browsers.

My Windows 7 machine has the "Symbol" font from Monotype (I think if is preinstalled) and has the Greek characters at the ASCII letter code points (I guess it's a clone of Adobe's "Symbol" font), so the p is displayed as π by the Chrome and IE browsers, though strangely, Firefox persists in showing it as p.

I guess the web-pages could be converted to UTF-8 by transliterating the parts spanned by the <font face="symbol"> tags. But the formulae constructed using tables would need to be manually converted to use MathJax or MathML.

(EDIT: The encoding is shown on Wikipedia: Symbol_(typeface)#Encoding.)

Quote:Decoding those formulae would be a lot of fun /s note how the divisions are constructed using table objects and <hr> tags...

I noticed that. I guess more modern math rendering wasn't an option for them at the time, especially considering the pages appear to be constructed with Microsoft FrontPage 4.0 and 5.0.

Quote:EDIT: When I copy the text from the browser and paste it into Word, it renders as intended.

I'd hope so, since it was generated with Microsoft tools in the first place!