APL Characters

In theory, you should see APL characters even with "Arial". Well, almost. Truth is that the version of "Arial" Windows is coming with is not a full Unicode font. There is a font "Arial Unicode MS" available on many machines, but this font comes with some versions of Microsoft Office and some versions of the Microsoft Publisher. This font is not free anyway.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. Furthermore, experience shows that most fonts used as the default fonts by Browsers are not showing any APL characters at all: Most chars you look at thinking "ah, great, that's APL!" are not APL but mathematical symbols like |⊂⊃∩∪&=≠⍟. For details see BrowserTest.

However, even if you cannot see the APL chars in the Browser, you might still be able to copy the page into the clipboard and insert it into one of the Unicode capable interpreters, although this is only theoretically of interest: if you have such an interpreter you would also have an appropriate Unicode font on your machine anyway!

So to be sure that you can see APL characters we suggest to install one of the follwing fonts. They are listed in a particular sequence. The first one to be found on your system defines the one which is actually used by your browser, accept you've forced your browser to use a particular font - see ConfigureYourBrowserForAPL how to do this.

The "APL385 Unicode" Font

If you have installed Dyalog APL version 11 or later, you will have this font installed already.

The font can be downloaded from:

http://www.dyalog.com/download/unicode/apl385.ttf

This font is the first choice: when installed, the APL wiki will use it. Note that this font is supposed to contain all APL symbols available, so it should be fine with any Unicode-capable APL dialect.

If you have Dyalog APL 11 or better installed, this font is already installed on your system.

The "APLX Upright" Font

If you have installed a desktop version of APLX (full or evaluation copy), you will have this font installed already.

The font can be downloaded from:

http://www.microapl.co.uk/download/aplx_unicode.ttf

Note that this font does not contain all characters. For example, the Dyalog-specific ⍨ is not contained in that font.

The "APL2 Unicode"

This is a Unicode font that comes with APL2.

The "SImPL" Font

This font has all of the APL characters in use in all of the APL interpreters past and present; it may be downloaded from http://www.vector.org.uk/resource/simpl02.zip. A variant of this font (called SImPL medium) is bundled with NARS2000. Moreover, here's a description of the extra glyphs this interpreter would like to see in any APL Unicode font. If you download and unzip any NARS2000 binary, you'll obtain a copy of this variant.

Other APL fonts won't work

Note that fonts like "Dyalog Std", "Dyalog Alt", "Causeway" and many others are not Unicode fonts. Therefore, the APL wiki does not even try to use them: they won't work!

Browsers

Every modern Browser should be fine. I suggest the latest Firefox for best results.

If you use Internet Explorer, make sure that it is version 7 or better. Everything else is a nightmare. IE7 works just fine on about 99% of the boxes. On some machines, however, it does not work. So far nobody can explain why.

"It works with the APL wiki, but not elsewhere"

The APL wiki explicitly tells a browser to use one of the true APL Unicode fonts mentioned above. Furthermore, any page in the APL wiki declares itself as truly Unicode-capable. Therefore, it simply works: modern Browsers know what to do.

But if you use that very same browser to visit APL discussion groups hosted by either Google (like comp.lang.apl) or Yahoo (like dyalogusers) or to send emails with embedded APL chars via a Browser (for example via GoogleMail), then you must configure your Browser accordingly, otherwise it won't work. See ConfigueYourBrowserForUnicode for details

For displaying APL chars in emails and News Readers, things are a bit more complex. See ConfiguringMailAndNewsReaders for details.