Little YouTube play icon doesn't show in Windows XP

[MrMaguire]

In the name of being OCD, I'd like to point out another minor cosmetic defect on Windows XP.

 

 

When watching a YouTube video (in Pale Moon in this case), a small play symbol shows next to the video title. That's pretty cool. It even shows in the browser title bar, and the browser taskbar tab(s). Except on Windows XP (and older), it doesn't.

 

 

 

This is what you get on XP. So, I'm guessing that XP and older are missing a font or something that this is dependent on. Anybody know which one?

 

 

 

I'm posting here because I can't find much about this on Google.

[j7n]

g.h.uv=function(a){g.Re||(window.document.title=1==a?"\u25b6 "+this.A:this.A)};

25B6; BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE

The fonts on my system that have this symbol are:

Kepler Std

Kozuka Mincho Pro

Lucida Sans Unicode *

Minion Pro

Utopia Std

All except one are Adobe OpenType PostScript fonts.

Browsers will usually replace missing symbols on a character (firefox) or paragraph element (opera) basis from all installed fonts. I think Opera holds configuration for Unicode Character Ranges somehwere and uses that. Firefox can switch fonts on literally every symbol. If you have a webpage with normal text and one Japanese symbol, that one symbol might get pulled from another font, not excplitly declared on the webpage. The remainder of the paragraph after this symbol might be shown using that foreign font as well.

I don't know if WinNT 6.1 also does this. But WinXP most certainly does not. I imagine looking up every character into a table of replacements is a very slow process. Especially since Unicode is quite bloated with funny symbols. The symbol only shows up on the Windows title bar if I choose a font which has this 25B6 in it.

You can copy-paste this character into common Unicode capable software like Microsoft Word and browse your list of fonts to see which one has it.

▶

Edited May 30, 2015 by j7n

[CamTron]

Hmmm... That little character shows up on every browser I use on XP, and even Windows 2000.

 

On both Windows 2000 and Windows XP, I can type that symbol in WordPad using Microsoft Sans Serif and Tahoma, but it doesn't show up in the Character Map with either of those fonts. I think there's some low-level font substitution going on there which provides that character for those fonts.

And the play icon shows up in the taskbar, too.

yt_play_icon_tab.bmpyt_play_icon_taskbar.bmp

[MrMaguire]

I pasted the icon into Microsoft Word on my Windows 7 computer, and it showed the used font as MS Mincho. So I went into the fonts folder, and transferred a copy of MS Mincho onto my Windows XP virtual machine. Now the icon will show in Microsoft Word (on the virtual machine), but the icon still won't show in the title bar and taskbar for YouTube.

 

I also tried Opera 12.15. No dice.

[j7n]

Looks like I was wrong about there not being a character substitution in Windows 2000/XP. There is at least one practical mechanism called "Font Linking". It doesn't work automatically like in web browsers though. You have to manually specify the list of fonts to fall back to. A configuration change like that might require a reboot to apply.

 

In font linking it is possible to link one or more fonts (called "linked fonts") to another font (called the "base font"). Once you link fonts, you can use the base font to display code points that do not exist in the base font, but that do exist in one of the linked fonts. For example, linking a hangul font and a Japanese font to a Tahoma font allows you to display both Korean and Japanese characters in Tahoma font.

The wrong font link entry can leave the system unstable and impacts machine performance.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontLink\SystemLinkType: REG_MULTI_SZName: Tahomal_10646.ttf,Lucida Sans Unicodeanother.ttf,Another Font

I didn't mean that you should accept the font that Microsoft Word shows as the first option. Rather, go to Format > Font or an equivalent dialog, and cycle through all your fonts to see which ones look good at low point sizes, have the symbol and aren't too large.

I recall some versions of the Rich Text control had a font substitution "feature". Not a very intelligent one. It was more like a bug when dealing with plain text. If I loaded a non-text file, such an executable file, to look for text strings in it, into a text editor like Wordpad or Nico's Commander's editor, the program would switch from the configured monospaced font (Courier New) to other fonts, usually variable pitch, and take a very long time to show anything on screen. This started happening after the OS was updated (if you touch a working system with updates or service packs, problems will appear in unexpected places).

Edited June 2, 2015 by j7n

[j7n]

I finally had a chance to test this function. It works as I expected. The triangle is also surprisingly precisely drawn/hinted. Firefox itself doesn't appear to be using FontLink (a different triangle is substituted).

Edited June 13, 2015 by j7n