Getting Symbol Fonts to Display in Firefox

Here’s something that’ll be interesting for the geek crowd.

I was working on my departments blog and was trying to get a character to display using the Wingdings font. The character was diplaying perfectly in IE but not in Firefox. No matter what I tried it wouldn’t work.

After alot of trial & error and web research I cam up with the following solution outlined here (at the bottom of the page).

  1. Open this file from your Firefox installation directory: \res\fonts\fontEncoding.properties. (If you installed to the default directory the path will be C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\res\fonts\fontEncoding.properties.)
  2. Find the following lines of text:

    # Symbol font
    encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding

  3. Replace thoese lines with the following:

    # Symbol font
    ## encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding
    # Symbol font
    #encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding
    #– fixing by hand — Enabling Symbol font for Mozilla on Windows
    #– file://C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox/res/fonts/fontEncoding.properties
    encoding.symbol.ttf = windows-1252
    encoding.wingdings.ttf = windows-1252
    encoding.wingdings2.ttf = windows-1252
    encoding.wingdings3.ttf = windows-1252
    encoding.webdings.ttf = windows-1252

You will now be able to view the Symbol, Wingdings, Wingdings2, Wingdings3 and Webdings fonts in Firefox. Note that this must be done on the client end. In other word, people who have not made this change to their Firefox installations will not be able to see the fonts.

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