Get Dingbats to appear in Firefox 3?

Inspired by this question on Meta: Is the mark to the left of the badges supposed to be a square or a checkmark?

On my FireFox, the "check" mark appears as a box with numbers in it, rather than a tick:

On Meta, they suggested checking your font settings, but I haven't seen anything that looks obviously untoward:

(I recently changed the encoding to UTF-8, as suggested, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference.)

The other recommendation proffered was to check out the List of Unicode Characters and use it to identify what's missing. The tick is in the "Dingbats" section - as far as I can tell, the only one of that section that my machine is rendering is the aeroplane (2708).

Does anyone know what I can do to fix it?

Solution 1:

The character in that post is this one:

✔

U+2714 - CHECK MARK, HEAVY

Ensure that you have a font installed that contains that character. If the font does not contain the character, it may be resolved using an alternative font. I'm a little hazy on how this happens and whether it would be done by the operating system or the application. I expect it would be done by the Gecko rendering engine, so upgrading to a newer version of Firefox may fix things.

If you want to reliably write the character in a post, even though you can't view it, write it as a HTML entity:

✔

(That'll work here because the Markdown editor supports HTML - it is not something that'll work in any text field.)

Note that, although there is an entry in the Mozilla FAQ about symbols/dingbats, it does not apply in this case.

Solution 2:

From https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1861/check-marks-indicating-obtained-badges-use-unicode-10004-symbol-not-available/1879#1879 :

This can be corrected (in IE at least) by going to Tools > Internet Options > "General" tab > Fonts and select "Arial Unicode MS" as the default font.