On Tuesday 13 July 2010 20:57, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote: > If I have a page such as the following : > > <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" > "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd";> <html> > <head> > <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> > <title>Armenian test</title> > <style type="text/css"> > BODY {font-family : "Arial Unicode MS", sans-serif} > </style> > </head> > > <body> > <h1>Եւ երկիր էր աներևոյթ և անպատրաստ. և խաւար ի վերայ անդնդոց. և > Հոգի Աստուծոյ շրջէր ի վերայ ջուրց</h1> > </body> > </html> > > I have presumably chosen my primary font not only because I feel its > aesthetics are appropriate but also because it supports the necessary > subset of Unicode to correctly display the characters that make up > the page. But if for some reason the visitor's browser does not have > access to (in this case) Arial Unicode MS, and falls back to the > generic "sans-serif", there is (as far as I can see) no way of > guaranteeing that the page will still display correctly. > > Is there, therefore, in CSS, some way of specifying as a part of the > font fallback sequence that any font selected as a result of fallback > must support a specific subset of Unicode such that the page can be > guaranteed to display correctly provided that such a font does in > fact exist on the visitor's machine ? And is there any way, presumably > using a combination of HTML and CSS, to display a suitable error message > using solely ASCII characters if such a font cannot be found ?
Would it help to create a page with all the Unicode chars in the range you are using and ask who can see how many based on font selections on a per paragraph basis. For *my* Linux "Nimbus Roman No9 L" may be a well populated serif font and "Nimbus Sans L" as sans serif (dunno i haven't gone into it that much). You could also get replies from Mac, Windows 7, Vista and XP users and try for the best combinations. I don't know the maximum fonts you can have in a CSS fonts list - anyone? Alternatively, if you are dealing with particularly uncommon glyphs it could pay to use images of the ones you want instead. HTH -- Michael ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
