• AplCharacters

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

Most browsers manage to display only some APL symbols, some none. For details see BrowserTest.

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

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

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

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 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.