Apparently it is possible for an html document to specify a font that your viewer should use. It does not appear, from my limited experience, that this is done too often except by people who want to make flashy (usually annoying) ads.

If you have the font that the "document" asks for, that should be what you see.

Most of what you see - including mudcat - will be displayed in the font that you set, or the default you use that came with your viewer.

In Windows, (I'm looking at Win98 at the moment) using Internet Explorer (IE) you can go to Start - Settings - Control Panel - Internet options, and on the "General" tab there should be a "Fonts" button. You can use it to choose whatever font you want, for a default.

You choose one font to use for proportional (variable width letters). The most common here are Times, Times Roman, Times New Roman, or one of the Arial/Helvetica family, etc. You choose another font for "equispace" - all letters the same width. This one is almost always set to one or the other of the Courier family.

Unless the document you are viewing specifies a font (more properly called a typeface), and you have that font, all your viewer will receive is a number that defines a certain character. An "A" is an "A" whether you view it in Times or Ariel or Zapf Dingbats.

Most common fonts include approximately the same set of characters. If you can see it in Times, you'll see it in Arial, and swapping around won't change things very much.

Changing fonts, among the common ones, won't have much effect on what you see, since most of them just use different glyphs (the on-screen picture) for the same characters.

If the character needed is not associated with a glyph in the font you're using, your viewer should thrash around 'mongst the other fonts available to try to find the character and display it. There are limits to how much it can accomplish here though.

The ∞ is character number 8734 in the Unicode standard book, and if you tack an & (flag to say that what follows is something spiffy) followed by a # (flag that says the spiffy stuff is a number), followed by the number, and then a ; (flag to say that spiffy stuff is done now), the document pastes in that character. (note that "flag" is colloquial for techie stuff)

The HTML 4 Specification defines about 250 characters, and gives them handy names. The ∞ doesn't happen to be one of them.

I've posted the HTML 4 defined characters at HTML CHARACTERS REDACT, along with how they work on my setup.

There are a lot of other characters - not specifically defined in the HTML spec - that work. A run through the first 13,000 possible character numbers on my system show about 950 that display - in my IE5 setup. There are very few of them (∞ excepted, of course) that would be useful for much on mudcat.

John