[jbenny]

Since we've had some discussion on such character entities as em-dash and zero width non-joiners in several different threads, I thought I would make a list of the most often used HTML character entities, as listed on the W3.org site. I have attached both an HTML file and a Mobipocket file, so that others can use them for testing.

On my own Windows XP system, I see that Firefox displays them all. IE 6 misses a few of the Greek Letters and the first seven under Symbols and General Punctuation. FBReader misses almost the same characters as IE6, except that it does get the three spaces under General Punctuation and misses the next four characters. This is particularly interesting, as the exact same set of fonts is available to all of these programs on my PC.

I also viewed the Mobipocket file on a Palm emulater, with real Mobipocket reader software. On the Palm practically al the Greek letters are wrong, several of the Symbols and a few of the General Punctuation.

As for the oft-mentioned zero wide non-joiners, only Firefox and the Palm got this right. That's a shame, as zwnj would solve some of display problems with hyphenation, as has been suggested by others.