The Evil that is IE.

[swestrup]

I've got a simple question: is it possible to get IE to reliably produce monospaced text so that you could, for instance, display ASCII art using it? I had assumed the answer was 'Yes', but a recent experiment seems to belie that notion.

If you check this out, you'll see a not-quite-finished web page about Unicode's box drawing characters and my attempts at using them to, well, draw boxes. The (unfinished) chart at the very bottom of the page is made by sticking a whole bunch of unicode entities together inside a monospaced font statement.

In Firefox this looks exactly as intended. In IE its a mess because the spaces and the line-drawing characters are different sizes, despite being inside a monospace area. I'm not sure how, or if, its possible to fix in IE. Anyone know?

Comments

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

Some images generated by some programs as HTML consist of a table with a huge number of very tiny cells, each with its own background colour. Horribly slow, takes forever to convert to anything else, but something like this just *might* work, though it seems to defeat the whole point of box-drawing characters.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

The only problem I see with that display is that one of the cells (to the right of "x67" contains the string "x0", and as I don't have any font for code point 0350 it gets displayed as an "unknown glyph" box which is bigger than a character cell.

[swestrup]

Interesting. What version of Internet Explorer did you use?

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Oh, sorry to be unclear - that was with Firefox. It's pretty clear that's a typo in the HTML, cause that's the only position that has 5 digits instead of 4.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see the HTML in the comments swallowed part of my comment - it contains the string ͐ (x00350, which gets parsed as a 4-byte Unicode char 0035 followed by a 0). I just looked it up, and that's a combining diacritic, so it makes no sense to have it on its own.

I just tried in in IE, and it looks fine, using version - uh, I can't copy text from this dialog box. Idiotic. Here's an image: http://notcharles.ca:8000/ie-about.png

The version of IE listed above deals with the unknown character by drawing a simple box, the same size as a character.

Windows Firefox deals with it by drawing a ?. The version string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6

Linux Firefox deals with it by drawing a fancy box of numbers that's much bigger than a character, so it messes the formatting up. The box is turned off so I can't get at the version string, but it's the one from Ubuntu unstable (although I haven't updated for a while so it could be a few minor revisions old).

[swestrup]

Yeah, the x00350 was a typo, but it isn't the source of the problem. Clearly you don't see in IE what I see, which is interesting considering we're using the exact samver version. Here's what I get in Firefox:



While in IE it looks like this:



Which is way wrong.