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That box to the left of "50 followers" is supposed to be a black star. When I "inspect element" on this character, I see a style definition:

font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;

When I copy that character and paste it into an ascii character identifier, I see that it's ★ aka U+2605: Black Star. I don't have Helvetica Neue or Helvetica, and although I have Arial, it appears that this character is not included in the version of Arial included in the OS, which is Windows XP Professional.

However: as I understand it, when I disable this style definition in my "inspect element" style browser, the next available style takes over:

font-family: Arial,Liberation Sans,DejaVu Sans,sans-serif;

…And the character appears. Perhaps coincidentally: I do have DejaVu Sans, and this character is included in that font's character set.

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  • 1
    Windows automatically uses Arial as a fallback for Helvetica, so the problem is more complicated.
    – Jukka K. Korpela
    Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 17:03
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    I have Windows, and I do not have the Helvetica font, but I see the star character just fine. It is not related to Helvetica.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 17:07
  • @CodyGray Interesting; can you tell what font it uses? (In some browsers you can right-click the character, select "Inspect Element", and see the styles.)
    – meetar
    Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 17:57
  • The pop-up window goes away too quickly for me to figure out how to inspect it. But if I copy the character, and place it into the markdown editor, I see the star just fine. Inspecting it, I see that it is using a font-family of Arial, 'Liberation Sans', 'DejaVu Sans', sans-serif (the normal body fonts). Since this machine has neither Liberation Sans nor DejaVu Sans, it is clearly rendering this star using the Arial font. Or whatever sans-serif is.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Aug 13, 2013 at 6:30
  • Do other Unicode characters work properly on your machine? What happens when you type ★ into a Google search box? I see Your search - ★ - did not match any documents. with the star in the middle there.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Aug 13, 2013 at 6:32
  • @CodyGray The "sans-serif" declaration means that any font of the type "sans-serif" should be used as a last resort. The version of Arial that came with my OS does not include that character. Other Unicode characters work fine, but only if they're included in the font. (And I get a box in the Google result too.)
    – meetar
    Commented Aug 13, 2013 at 12:31
  • @Hynes any update, half year later?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 12:52
  • @ShadowWizard Nothing more than to say that it's in process. We have some larger items moving here and imagine this change will get rolled out with it. Unfortunately I don't have an ETA. I'll update the thread though when the changes are live.
    – Hynes
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 13:38
  • Fair enough @Hynes thanks, just thought a local fix might be quicker. :)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 13:42
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    @ShadowWizard Yeah. For the last 6 months I've been primarily focused on Career 2.0 design work and Jin has been focused on Communities. We've just added two more designers to the team in the last 6 weeks, so their will be more people to get to items like this that require a little exploration first (we want to make sure things don't break elsewhere).
    – Hynes
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 13:45
  • @Hynes cheers, looking forward to see one of those new designers jumps by and posting here when it's done. :-D
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 13:48
  • 2
    FWIW, the new tag popup doesn't use this character anymore.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Jun 13, 2022 at 14:48

1 Answer 1

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It could be an issue of not having "Helvetica Neue" specifically. We can look at expanding our font definitions to include something more like this:

font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Regular", "Helvetica Neue Regular", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif;

This font-stack solution was proposed by Chris Coyier a few years ago and its purpose is to help hit on at least one of the versions of Helvetica out there (Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica-Neue, HelveticaNeue, etc).

We're in the process of starting to look at our CSS here at Stack Exchange, so we'll add a fuller font-stack solution to the list.

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