Bill D - and others who might be interested:

There has been much discussion about "characters" in what turned into an html practice thread at I can do ¿... recently.
Some of you might be interested in a couple of things I ran into while doing some "off-site" poking around, and here's a summary of some of the interesting stuff that's scattered around in that thread:

George Seto suggests http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~jwmitch/iso8859-1.html, for a nice clean chart of some of the html special characters. Nice clean site, and could be useful. One of the few places I've seen comment (brief) in differences between PC and Mac, but unfortuantely no discussion.

If you want the "real poop" you can consult the W3C Committee HTML 4.01 Specification . If you go down a couple of pages to the table of contents, you can click into the character definitions there. (This has been posted before, but it fits in with the topic here.)

If you want to see what a character looks like - especially ones that don't work, you can go to Unicode website, or you can go directly to the Online Unicode Handbook.

Bill D suggested a couple of pieces of pretty nice looking freeware called AllChars and Extended Character Map. While I have other utilities for what they do, they look like pretty clean stuff, and could be helpful to others.

I've posted the HTML 4 "defined characters" at HTML CHARACTERS REDACT, along with how they work on my setup. There have been some additions, particularly relating to what fonts people are likely to have.

An interesting site for those reallly interested in all this character coding stuff is at Alan Wood's Homesite. Some interesting comparisons of different "character definitions." I'd take a couple of technical issues with some of what's in his character comparisons, but the information seems basically sound.

Microsoft has a free plug-in that enhances the information you get when you right-click on a font and choose properties - for TrueType fonts only. With the plug-in installed, instead of a 2-tab display of the name of the font (and sometimes a version number) you get 9 tabs that tell you things like how many characters are included, whether it includes Unicode extended characters, whether you can imbed it, and quite a bit more. There is a brief description on Alan Wood's site, but the download is free from Microsoft typography.

Alan Wood also mentioned an interesting freeware utility called Character Agent. His description is here or you can get it (for free - if you give them your email addy) from Bjondi.

The Extended Character Map suggested by Bill D appears to display only the "ANSI" range of characters, while Character Agent displays the full Unicode range for your installed fonts. Character rendering in CharAgent is a little weak, but it seems to cover a lot more ground.

John