Using Symbol font to display Greek letters with Firefox or Netscape 6+

Is this text in Greek letters: ihsou cristou? If not, read on.

Although Mozilla-based browsers, such as Firefox or Netscape, attempt to use Adobe standards for rendering symbols, they don't work on most Windows-based computers. To get thse browsers to display letters in the standard Symbol font you need to alter a configuration file called fontEncoding.properties.

1. Change to the directory containing this file. On my system it is located at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\res\fonts or \Program Files\Netscape\Netscape\res\fonts

2. Open fontEncoding.properties with a text editor such as Notepad.

3. Find the line containing the symbols definition. It should look like:

     # Symbol font
     encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding

4. Comment out the existing line by placing a '#' character at the beginning of the line.

5. Now enter

     encoding.symbol.ttf = windows-1252

The result should look like :

     # Symbol font
     # encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding
     encoding.symbol.ttf = windows-1252

6. Save the file and restart Firefox or Netscape.

7. Although not required for these pages, for the sake of completeness you may wish to edit the file ...\res\mathml.css and reverse the order of the items Symbol and Times in the line beginning with

     font-family: CMSY10, Symbol, Times ... 

to read

     font-family: CMSY10, Times, Symbol ...