Bill D -

Neither of your infinities shows in my IE. Both of them posted to the page code as ∞ for the first, and with the closing ";" omitted on the second. If you post HEX codes, most sites will automatically convert to decimal - although sometimes it's the other way around.

At char code 8734 you're getting w.a.y..u.p..t.h.e.r.e in the Unicode pages. Anything outside the ANSI range 30 thru 256 is likely to be "unpredictable" as to what it will look like to randomly chosen readers. There are a few isolated characters that will appear for reasonable numbers of viewers, but the web "just ain't fully modern" for most users.

Of course it's preferred that you code unusual characters. Those who can't see your characters can always right-click and look at the page code, and go to the Unicode standard to see what you meant(???).

For those who just can't handle the "real methods," among the "safest" ways to compose things with "strange" characters is to type them in Word, using standard Word shortcuts. YOU SHOULD NOT USE THE "INSERT SYMBOL" METHOD. You can also copy and paste from the Windows "Character Map" if you use only the "normal" character sets. If you set for Unicode char set, you'll find that a couple of the extended fonts may have virtually all (well- maybe half?) the Unicode characters, but the high ones are unlikely to work on the web.

If you can enter the characters "by typing them" and see what you expect in Word, you usually can copy and paste to a post and expect most people to see it as intended, although there may still be some "failured glyphs." The one reading the post is where it's decided whether an individual glyph will be presented properly, so you can't force anybody to see languages they haven't chosen to install for.

When you paste or post, you don't send "letters," you send character codes, and filtering them through a standard Word Processor will usually filter out most of what won't work reasonably well. Most wp programs will work similarly (although it's been noted by some, for example, that Mac Word is a little less successful than Windows Word. It's not a large difference.)

John