User:Mjb/Phonorecord copyright symbol

Content removed
In 2007, I did some research into whether Discogs should encourage the use of the Unicode character for the phonorecord copyright symbol is ℗ (U+2117). Some users were opposed to it because their browsers couldn't display ℗; they wanted to instead use ⓟ (U+24C5), which was somewhat more widely supported. I hated this idea, because it's the wrong character, both semantically and aesthetically.

The main problem is that fonts, as used in computer operating systems, generally only contain glyphs for a subset of the bazillion characters in Unicode. On top of that, you can't guarantee that people are using the fonts you want. A smart text rendering system, when told to render a character that the desired font doesn't have, will look for a suitable replacement from some other font. I believe that's what happens now. It wasn't happening in 2007.

So, in 2007, I did some testing with my browsers at home, and put my notes on this wiki page. The idea was to see what worked and what didn't, and whether we could maybe implement a workaround that would force the proper display of ℗ on everyone's browsers.

However, soon after I started doing that, browsers became more robust and were able to display the proper ℗ character without us having to resort to workarounds or doing anything fancy with web fonts. At least, I think it's working for most people, most of the time.

So as of 2013, I've deleted my notes. If you really want to see them, there's a history link at the top of this page, and you can go back and look.