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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_number that what the author in-consistently refers to as "p" (though, later there is a reference to "e or pi" - is actually pi, or π - I don't think I've ever seen pi referred to as "p" - anybody care to hazard a guess as to why the author did so?

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In the source you'll find every occurence of pi as

    <span style='font-family:Symbol'>p</span>

Apparently the Symbol typeface has π as p: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_(typeface)#Encoding. I guess that ones who has the correct font installed will see the expected character.

The source looks like this so I guess it is a font issue on your side, I see the proper symbol for pi.

  <span style="font-family:Symbol">p</span>

One can argue that its more a typographic issue than a font issue.

The author probably did see a "pi", but should have been using an embedded font, or even better, the unicode "GREEK SMALL LETTER PI", π.

My only problem with the Unicode GREEK SMALL LETTER PI is that it consistently renders on the systems I've used as a square with the bottom portion cut off. This must be intentional, because I just zoomed in to this page to an absurd degree and it consistently renders that way even at 36+ pts. It makes sense to me that in day-to-day life with real Greek the simpler rendering is superior, it doesn't match the traditional mathematical rendering very well.

If you go to this[1] page and click "View All", you'll see that it's "Verdana" or "Tahoma", two pretty common web fonts, that are likely to be the culprit.

[1]: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/03c0/fontsuppor...

There is always U+1D70B MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL PI, but it isn’t available in very many fonts.

Unicode: The solution to, and the cause of, all life's font problems.

Pi only seems to render like a square on certain fonts.

Which is why I've qualified my statement, on account of it only being the case sometimes.

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