… my OS X 10.3.9 laptop started rendering that character as a Z with a set of rabbit ears on top

Haha, the character you are getting is the capital latin Ž. We use it in Serbian, as an entity I have always used # 382 for the lowercase and of course # 381 for the uppercase. It is pronounced like “zh”, the first sound you make when you say, lets see, “jargon”. Something like that. :)

☮

Peter: that’s a great idea, since Firefox does in fact show the Z-caron instead of the pencil. Unfortunately, the computed style information in the DOM Inspector claims that the computed font family is Arial, which is understandable: that’s what I specify. Character-level fallback happens after the font is computed, apparently, and it’s falling back to FreightMicro.

Even more fun: if I edit the relevant line of my CSS as follows:

#thoughts ul.meta li.editpost a {border: none; color: #999;}

…then the pencil comes back in all cases except comments from me, which have boldfaced metainformation. There, FreightMicro comes back, since apparently the character fallback code will use a font face that has the character even if the default has it, but only in a normal-weight face. That might not have made much sense, but it’s the best I can do right now.

So I think it’s time to hunt down and kill FreightMicro, mostly for lying about what characters it has, or about its Unicode mapping, or whatever it is that’s caused it to screw this up.

I have found that different browsers will access different character sets – on my system the glyphs look different in Opera and Firefox; Firefox seems to have its own set stashed somewhere.

Font browser

Handige font-browser [via]

d.d. 15
Dec
2005
[...]

And wow, does it ever take a lot to get the character palette enabled. I had to Google for it and then follow the very clear but lengthy instructions from Todd Dominey.

Even more frustrating: when I look in the Unicode Table in the Character Palette, the proper symbol shows up at 2700F. When I select it, the “collections containing selected character” shows me all of the FreightMicro variants, and Zapf Dingbats, which contains the character I actually want.

Rob: nope, don’t use Suitcase. I don’t think I’ve upgraded Safari recently, but either way Idoubt that’s the issue since the same problem appears in both Safari and Firefox.

I guess I can either dump FreightMicro, or else alter my CSS for that link to try symbol fonts instead of sans-serif fonts. But if I understand Unicode handling properly, there’s no way FreightMicro should even be pretending that it has that character available. So I’m kind of inclined to blow it away, just for being a bad actor.

http://stcassociates.com/lab/fontbrowser.html

…and hit the special character button. You’d then have to scroll through all of your fonts to find the “z”

Probably not the quickest or most direct way to find the “z”‘s font…but its one way none the less.