Enlarged Bullet That Demarcates Water Cooler/Words Snippets From Commentary UPDATED

Martel is the blog’s text font [UPDATE No longer. —lambert]; its bullet character is too small to demarcate quoted text from commentary in a text-heavy environment like this one. A sample from in Martel:

That work is now expected to proceed in coming days.” • Wondering where Palantir and DOGE are in all this.

I installed and tested four or five Drupal string manipulation modules, in the hopes of searching for the small bullet and replacing it with different and larger character on submission, but nothing worked. Several were batch, and I might as well copy and paste the bullets. None of the other ones worked at all. I’m sure there’s a JavaScript solution, but I didn’t want to figure out how to do that.

This site showed how to cajole CSS into replacing characters in one font with characters in another. In my case, for a single character (the bullet) I wanted to replace Martel with a font where the bullet is larger, by addressing a Unicode range with a single code point. The CSS code looks like this:

@font-face {
    font-family: "Bullet";
    unicode-range: U+2022;
    src: url('fonts/arial_black.ttf') format('truetype');
    size-adjust: 175%;
    ascent-override: 5%;
}

“U+2022” is the code point for a bullet. Arial Black has a bigger bullet than most fonts. size-adjust makes it even bigger. I tried ascent-override and line-gap-override the move the new, larger bullet more toward the baseline, to center it vertically, but neither work for some unknown reason.

The font-family is applied to HTML p elements like this:

p {
    font-family: "Bullet",'Martel', serif;
}

That is, any bullet character is fontified in the “Bullet” family; for any other character, that fontification will fail, and CSS will cascade to Martel, the default body font.

Result:

That work is now expected to proceed in coming days.” • Wondering where Palantir and DOGE are in all this.

Sheesh.

NOTE If anybody has a solution for the baseline problem, please contact me.

NOTES

[1] It would have been nice to have full-fledged string replacement functionality, so as to automagically replace “depression,” say, with “banana” (or “Karl Marx” with “The Bearded One”), but such was not to be.