How do I know if the characters in my font will show properly?

Its a web safe font, but its not a normal character

[Jeremy_H]

Real basic question.

I want to use a character, but I don't know if it will be supported very well.

The character is a down arrow: Бе

Above is from the times font, and it seems to show the same under all the other fonts too.

I use charset utf-8.

Will my visitors see a down arrow?

Right now I use a down arrow, but its a graphic. I'm thinking if I use the font character, I'll reduce a server request, speed up my site, and minimize my bandwidth. (Albeit by a very small amount, it is an optimized graphic, but still, every bit counts).

Any advice? Thanks

[Jeremy_H]

OK, the fact that it didn't show properly here tells me something. But I'm wondering if this message board is escaping funky characters.

It loaded fine on my website with PC IE, PC FF, and PC Opera.

Without testing the world, how would I know if it will work or not?

Thanks

[stapel]

You say that you "use charset utf-8". Do you declare this character set in your pages? (Since that character set is not declared here, that might be part of the problem with the display here.)

Eliz.

[encyclo]

The charset here on the board is ISO-8859-1, which is why the arrow won't show up here.

For your site, the arrow will usually show up

- if you define the font to use explicitly rather than depend on the machine default, for example:

font-family:"Times New Roman", Georgia, serif;

- if the version of the font on the user's machine has the appropriate glyph to display the character, and

- if the UTF-8 charset is explicitly defined and the text is appropriately encoded.

Times New Roman in Windows has a very large range of glyphs, as do other standard fonts - you should check in OSX and in Linux too, but you should be OK.

[jezra]

What are you typing to get your down arrow? When I try to enter the code for a down arrow, "↓", the code is displayed and not the intended glyph.