I would think that you would first have to choose a font which actually has that character, if there isn't a standard font that contains it, then then you would probbly have to embed it in the page.

It's been years since I played around with font embedding, but I seem to remember that you could embed a single character from a font with Microsoft Weft. However, it's probably the case that a .GIF would be smaller!

Hi soapystar, I'm just curious as to which font you are using on which browser to actually get a 'star' to appear using the character entity ★?

I can't get a star to appear on any browser (under windows), using a variety of different fonts. ★ isn't part of the HTML4 standard either.

Quite by accident I viewed my 'star' test page on my old Win98 (test) machine, and to my surprise I was quite literally seeing stars! ★ was producing a solid 'star' in both IE5 and FF1 (not Opera7 though), seemingly regardless of which font was used... Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana! (Incidentally it is the same star that displays, regardless of font.)

So, there must be something/font that is unique to that machine which is producing the 'star'.

(Just to note, I had previously tried Unicode fonts on IE6, FF1.5 etc.)

Works on my PC even if you dont specify a font.

Yeah, it does on my old Win98 machine - any idea where the 'star' comes from / what font?

I copied-and-pasted the star from the browser into MS word and it came up as 'MS Mincho'. I tried changing the font and MS word refused to change the font name for those characters.

[support.microsoft.com...] lists fonts which MS will revert to to show double-byte characters. I suspect that's what's happening.

Ahh, that's an idea... although my version of Word is pretty old - it doesn't paste the star character correctly - and I don't have 'MS Mincho' either, although I do have 'MS Gothic' on that machine, so maybe it's in there too!? 'Arial Unicode MS' maybe another possibility judging by your link (but I don't have that either).

(I'm sure this knowledge will come in handy again one day!)