There are so many wonderful unicode symbols. This is amazing.
But they are all useless if I can't know if my user's font support them.
How can I find that out?
Can I track whether a user's font support a unicode symbol?
Any ways to have some kind of fallback? (If this unicode symbol isn't supported then show this other unicode symbol.)
Are there any OS/browser support references out there? (I've already extensively searched for such reference without any luck so far.)
What's your strategy to decide whether to use a unicode symbol?
I would love to use more of these lovely unicode symbols.
===Edit===
For example: I want to use the unicode "U+2605 ★ BLACK STAR" in my project's readme.md on GitHub. How can I know whether this unicode symbol will correctly be displayed?
If only someone would run this test to on all OS/browser and provide a compatibility table, that would be so awesome..
Modern browsers can display pretty much any character as long as the user has a font installed that includes it. So your question comes down to:
Well, I have created a tool that presents exactly that information.
This may have been overkill, since it is pretty easy to just @font-face include FontAwesome, IonIcons, or a similar font or symbol set that you know includes your desired characters. You could even download and include individual SVGs if you're only talking about a couple of symbols.
But if you want to save yourself an external dependency and network request while also benefiting from the easy CSS styling of plain text, this is your solution!
If it turns out you want to use a character that is not widely supported, I include the name of which free Google Noto font you can <link> or @font-face embed. There's also a browser to look through whole Unicode blocks at a time.
Anyway, take a look at Unicompat.com and see if it is what you're looking for. It's very much in beta, so apologies if anything is creaky.