On Jul 13, 2010, at 5:57 PM, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
> 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 ?
A modern OS / browser will do the job for you. You can specify a fallback font
if your first choice is not available:
p { font-family: font-a, font-b, font-c, serif;}
Gecko, WebKit, Opera, and IE 8+ will look for the glyphs in font-a, if that
doesn't have the coverage [*], the browser looks at font-b, then font-c; if
that fail, it takes the default serif font / or / look for something in the
list of installed fonts that provide coverage.
(and if none exist, you'd get a missing glyph character)
The good news for you: your first choice is installed by default on OS X and
Windows Vista +. For Linux, throw in DejaVu Sans
[*] or the font is not available
Example: on something I work on, text mostly containing Roman/English with
romanized Japanese characters & words, I specify 'Helvetica Neue' as the font
of choice on OS X; but that font doesn't have coverage for some romanized
characters (e.g ō), I thus specify a fallback: 'helvetica', that has
close-to-the-same metrics & look.
--
note: you could always provide, on an 'about' page or something, a short
explanation / list of required fonts.
One of these days I'll publish an article with my notes on all fallback fonts.
When I beat my laziness or something.
Philippe
---
Philippe Wittenbergh
http://l-c-n.com/
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