Comment by anigbrowl

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.