Posts from Thursday, December 15th, 2005

Pencilled In

Published 18 years, 3 months past

A followup to my previous post: thanks to the nearly impossible to find Character Palette (and thanks to Todd Dominey for instructions on how to enable and use it), I was able to determine the problem and restore my editing pencils.  It turns out that a beta copy of the font “Freight” was what caused the problem.  This beta copy of Freight was for some reason convinced that Unicode 9999 is the reference to a Z-caron instead of a pencil symbol.  It didn’t do this for 9998 or 10000.  Just 9999.

So I removed “beta Freight”, and the pencils returned.  Thanks to everyone who helped me out!

Update: there’s more to the story, namely that the copy of Freight in question was a beta, and not the final release, and the final release doesn’t have the problem that bit me.  I’ve edited this post to reflect that fact.


Pencilled Out

Published 18 years, 3 months past

Pretty much nobody but me ever sees this, but when I’m logged into meyerweb’s copy of WordPress (basically, all the time) I see a little pencil icon next to entries and comments.  It’s the “click here to edit this” link, and I generate it using the following markup:

<a href="[...]">&#9999;</a>

Ah, Unicode.

The problem is that at some point in the recent past, my OS X 10.3.9 laptop started rendering that character as a Z with a set of rabbit ears on top, whereas my OS X 10.3.9 desktop machine still shows the pencil.  I can only assume this is due to a recent software installation on the laptop, possibly one that stuck in a badly structured font or something.  Or else an update messed up the Unicode pointers.

Whatever the cause might be, does anyone out there know if there’s a way for me to figure out what font is being used to generate the funky Z, or how I might otherwise be able to track down and destroy it and get the pencils back?  Because it’s driving me frickin’ crazy.

Update: the problem is now fixed, as described in the followup entry.


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