Comment by anigbrowl
9 days ago
HN's text input panel displays ϕ as fancy and φ as plain. This is reversed in ordinary text display (a published comment, as opposed to a comment you are currently composing). And it's reversed again in the monospace formatting. (Which matches the input display.)
I'm glad you posted this. I'm not a unicode expert and have always assumed these weird dichotomies were some sort of user/configuration error on my part. Realizing the unicode glitches are actaully at the website end instead of between my ears is quite a relief.
To be more specific, that usage note strongly suggests that the problem is in the font used by HN. The font is what complies or doesn't comply with the Unicode standard. We can also say that HN has a problem, but HN's problem is "they're using a noncompliant font for monospaced text".
(On further investigation, I got the characters backwards, and HN's ordinary display is correct while the monospaced display isn't.)