Question re Euro symbol on the web

Bard

(also posted to comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html and comp.infosystems.www.misc on usenet)

Hi there,

I'm curious- what do people (people here, specifically) generally use to represent the Euro symbol on web sites? The way I see it, there are three possible alternatives -

1. Use the euro symbol (or € ) and assume that the end users character set/fonts include it.

2. Use the word "euro(s)" in plain text.

3. Use a GIF image representation of the symbol.

Which of the above would people reccommend?

Option 1, I would imagine, is not assuming TOO much these days, as most Windows platforms will support the symbol without problem.- these being Windows95 (with the euro font patch), Windows98, WindowsNT4 (SP4+), Windows2000. I'm naturally unsure about Apple Macintosh support for it as I don't use a Macintosh myself, but I'd expect that the Mac would be even LESS likely to have a problem with it. The platforms I don't really know about would be the likes of X-Windows on UNIX/Linux, BeOS, or other lesser used Operating Systems.

Any suggestions anyone has would be greatly appreciated. Naturally, I'd prefer to completely avoid option 3.

Thanks,

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Bard

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[This message has been edited by Bard (edited 20-07-2000).]

Shiminay

One of our client sites was having grief with us putting in the Euro symbol as a font character, so we're using gifs all the way.

The problem is, not all client PCs will be using an up to date font etc so this way covers it best (the gif is only a few bytes in size)

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All the best,

Dav
@B^)
My page of stuff

Bard

I think we're going to end up either using the prefix of "EUR" or suffix of "euro(s)"... safer that way really

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Bard

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Shiminay

How's about putting the alt text for the image as EUR or something like that?

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All the best,

Dav
@B^)
My page of stuff

Cerberus

Could you use stlye sheets to have the font that displays euros as the primary font and have some very common font as a secondary font? Although I am not sure what the secondary font would display in place of the euro. You would have to test.

Bard

That completely depends on what characters are in the font and what characters are not. It appears the euro isn't in Verdana on my system, strangely enough... as the symbol in the brackets in option 1 in my initial post above shows up for me as a box... strange

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Bard

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Cerberus

I see what you mean. I changed the font to verdana but I could still see the euro symbol. I dunno. I am out of ideas.

Bard

If I can avoid using an image for it at all, I will because of the slight server overhead, the slight browser rendering overhead (if there's, say, 100 products on screen, and the browser has to render 100 instances of the same image- it WILL slow things down slightly) and because we want to decide on a standard across the board for a number of sites.

Generally I'd avoid using an image where text will do the job just as well anyway... y'know...

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Bard

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Cerberus

If you wanted to go with the gif method then you could preload the image into the users cache once they connect to your site. I'm not sure how much overhead this would reduce in your case - probably only a minimal amount but every little helps if you have a slow connection.