Browser support for UTF-8 symbols

Question

I would like to replace some of the image icons in one of my websites with UTF-8 symbols. It seems that by far not every font in every browser supports all UTF-8 characters. Is there an overview anywhere which UTF-8 symbols are safe to use with the standard browser fonts (Verdana, Arial, etc.)?

Answer 1

No font supports all Unicode characters (which is what you mean by “UTF-8 characters”). Verdana and Arial are not standard, just common, and a font may exist in different versions (with different character repertoires).

So there is no general answer. But as a rough guide, the Windows Glyph List 4 is an attempt at defining a useful pan-European character collection, something that is sufficient for normal needs of European languages, including many commonly used special characters. It was meant to provide a guideline to font designers, and many modern fonts actually cover it, or most of it.

Replacing image icons by characters is usually unproductive, since things commonly used as icons are either not encoded as characters at all or encoded only recently and have very limited (or no) font support. But this really depends on the kind of symbols used and on the requirements on their shapes.