AHunter3’s symbol displays as the “unprintable character square” on my browser.
In the charmap.exe program, the square root symbol is listed as Unicode 221A. I am pasting that in here, “ã”
When pasted in, it looked good, however, on preview, I see that the character is, apparently, a double-byte character that presents a no-print square followed by a lower-case “a” with a carat. (And that is just in preview; who knows how it will display to the Teeeming Millions when it is posted.) I do not know whether there is a way to tell the browser to recognize double-byte characters on the fly (i.e. without programming a routine to handle it), so I suspect that the square root character is still unavailable for general use.
You can get Unicode characters from the hex by doing something like this:
√
becomes…
√
Looks like a checkmark on my browser (Netscape 7).
tomndebb’s Unicode character come through on my browser as the trademark symbol followed by the a with tilde (ã) between straight quotation marks –
end result “ã”
It’s all character encoding. Achernar’s checkmark looks okay on Win2K/Mozilla.
If you have a halfway decent browser, you should be able to manually change the encoding. Look for “character coding” or “coding” or whatnot.
If I look at the source code for this very page (you know, this one you’re reading) there’s no character coding expressed at all. Mozilla is showing it as Western ISO 8859-1, but I don’t know if that’s “auto detected” or just a default for non-specified pages.
If I hope over to Google, right away the page source reveals “charset=UTF-8” and Mozilla indicates it as Unicode. UTF8 is a hybrid kind of Unicode, whereby a character is represented by either one or two bytes. (off topic explanation of all this deleted)
In any case, if it’s not outside the realm of GQ (i.e., not considered a survey) we could all change our encodings and report what we see here for all the above glyphs.
Mozilla on Linux shows AHunter’s character as a question mark, which is the equivalent of the NPC box. In fact, the only of AHunter’s characters to come through is the ã.
Achernar’s character comes through fine, however.
And Mozilla, being a very good browser, allows you to select character encodings from a wide range of possible options. 