Editing Help:Special characters (section)

== IPA symbols ==
Most [[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA symbols]] are not included in the most widely used form of [[Times Roman|Times New Roman]] (though they are included in the version provided with [[Windows Vista]]), the default font for Latin scripts in [[Internet Explorer]] for [[Microsoft Windows|Windows]]. To properly view IPA symbols in that browser, you must set it to use a [[List of typefaces|font]] which includes the IPA extensions characters. Such fonts include [[Lucida Sans Unicode]], which comes with [[Windows XP]]; [[Gentium]], [[Charis SIL]], [[Doulos SIL]], [[DejaVu fonts|DejaVu Sans]], or [[Bitstream Cyberbit|TITUS Cyberbit]], which are [[free software Unicode typefaces|freely available]]; or [[Arial Unicode MS]], which comes with [[Microsoft Office]].
On this page, we have forced Internet Explorer to use such a font by default, so it should appear correctly, but this has not yet been done to all the other pages containing IPA. This also applies to other pages using [[meta:Help:Special characters|special symbols]]. Bear this in mind if you see error symbols such as "຦"<!-- The symbol used here, which is a valid but currently unassigned Unicode character U+0EA6, is here to demonstrate what the reader will see if they encounter a valid character which is missing in their fonts. Browsers like Firefox usually display these as a box, sometimes with the character code written inside; they do not display them as the replacement character. Thus, please, do not replace this character with U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER "�". Please do not change it to a Noncharacter such as U+FDD0 either: Noncharacters are for applications to use internally, and as such are "forbidden for use in open interchange of Unicode text data", and may get replaced by U+FFFD (see section 16.7 of Unicode, version 5.2) --> in articles. This also happens with former Spanish N with a small N above (Nᷠ nᷠ), Yañalif N with descender (Ꞑ ꞑ), and Volapük second umlaut variants of A, O and U (Ꞛ ꞛ, Ꞝ ꞝ, and Ꞟ ꞟ).
[[Google Chrome]] and other [[Chromium_(web_browser)|Chromium]]-based browsers on Windows have an issue in the font-fallback system, when the font lists for each script is hard coded. Chromium assumes these fonts should always be available, thus only search these fonts, mostly OS-specific through their system fonts, and cannot be user-configured other than changing the default fonts for standard, serif, sans-serif, and fixed-width styles, thus reducing flexibility. Thus some unrecognizable newer characters can't be fixed just by installing suitable external fonts, requiring users to update their operating system to those that contains the missing characters in one of the system fonts.<ref>{{cite web|title=chromium/font_fallback_win.cc at master - chromium/chromium|url=https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/master/third_party/blink/renderer/platform/fonts/win/font_fallback_win.cc#L99|website=GitHub|accessdate=20 August 2022}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|title=How do web browsers implement font fallback?|url=https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29241764/how-do-web-browsers-implement-font-fallback|website=StackOverflow|accessdate=20 August 2022}}</ref> 
Special symbols should display properly without further configuration with [[Mozilla Firefox]], [[Konqueror]], [[Opera (web browser)|Opera]], [[Safari (web browser)|Safari]] and most other recent browsers.