These browsers display Vector correctly:
on Windows XP and Vista
on MacOS X
The Vector website uses Unicode[1] and will display correctly only on modern browsers.
This technology allows cut-and-paste between Vector, the APL Wiki, Dyalog[2] interpreters, and Unicode text editors used to edit this site.
Although imperfectly implemented, its advantages outweigh its flaws, which we expect to disappear over time.
The browsers above will draw glyphs for APL characters from whatever fonts are installed on your machine.
Unicode fonts with glyphs for APL characters are now common on Windows and MacOS X machines. So Vector pages are likely to display correctly.
However, very few fonts display APL attractively. You will see the best results by downloading the APL385 Unicode font file and dropping it into your Fonts folder.
If the type size you see is not comfortable for reading your browser can probably adjust that for you.
In Internet Explorer, Firefox, Navigator and Opera scale the type size using the Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-- keys. This known as browser text scaling.
This site supports browser text scaling. The layouts and relative type stay in proportion through a fairly wide range of type sizes.
Some affected characters are:
∧) used for the and function∨) used for the or function∇) used to delimit function definitionsEven with APL385 Unicode installed, IE draws glyphs for certain APL characters from a different font. This is a bug in Internet Explorer 6.
While we recognise how widely IE is used, until this error is fixed we recommend upgrading to Internet Explorer 7, or using another Windows browser, such as Firefox, for reading Vector.
Firefox on MacOS X has an error that masks out most APL symbols. This error did not occur when tested in April 2007 against the development group’s ‘nightly build’, so we expect it to disappear in due course.
Until then Firefox on MacOS X is not suitable for reading Vector.