APL Characters

Contents

  1. APL Characters
    1. The "APLX Upright" Font
    2. The "APL385 Unicode" Font
    3. Other APL fonts won't work
  2. Browsers
  3. "It work's with the APL wiki, but not elsewhere"

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 some fonts are buggy: they contain most APL characters but not all.

So to be sure that you can see APL characters we suggest to install one of these fonts:

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

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

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 work's 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 truely Unicode-capable. Therefore, it simply works: modern Browsers know what to do. However, the APL chars might not look nice if you do not install one of the fonts mentioned above.

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, 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.