Some of the questions in the OWL system that you are using may require the use of the symbol font. If some questions do not seem to be displaying correctly, you may need to make some changes to your computer. There are two issues involved in getting symbol font characters to display correctly: making sure that the font is installed and setting the correct character set encoding in your browser.
Most PC and Macintosh computers should already have the symbol font installed. You can check this using any application that allows you to change the font for items that you type (word processor for example). Simply look through the list of available fonts to check that Symbol is in the list. If it is not listed, you’ll need to find and install the font.
Character set encoding is a browser setting. The required setting depends on the type of computer you are using. Finding the location in the browser to examine and change the setting depends on whether you are using Netscape or Internet Explorer and which version. In general, look under either the View or Options menu for the item Character Set, Encoding, or Document Encoding.
The character set encoding setting should be Western European (Windows) for Internet Explorer and Western(ISO-8859-1) for Netscape.
The current value for this will probably be Western(Latin1) or Western(ISO-8859-1). Change this to Western(Mac) or Western(MacRoman).
Symbol fonts may need to be enabled for Netscape running under X:
1. Edit your ~/.Xdefaults file and add the following line
Netscape*documentFonts.charset*adobe-fontspecific: iso-8859-1
2. Execute the command: csh> xrdb .Xdefaults
3. Restart Netscape
You may also need to change your character set encoding setting to Western(ISO-8859-1) if it isn't already.
· For other web sites you may need to change the character set encoding back to what it was for their pages to display properly.
· Unfortunately, there are some Macs where this still doesn’t fix the problem. In that case, you may need to try another browser or a higher version of the browser that you are using.