Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
Unicode has a very extensive collection of these characters, and as
long as you use reasonably popular fonts such as Times New Roman or
Arial, it's not a problem.
Is it necessary to "use reasonably popular fonts such as Times New
Roman or Arial" ? If Wikipædia is to be believed :
Some modern browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari and
Internet Explorer (version ? 7), are able to display multilingual
web pages by intelligently choosing a font to display each
individual character on the page.
it would seem (to me, at least) that regardless of the font in which
the message is composed, Seamonkey will do its best to display
correctly (that is, according to their Unicode-defined meaning) /all/
of the glyphs contained therein by mixing-and-matching fonts from the
available repertoire.
It depends a lot on how the page is coded and how the visitor's browser
is configured. For example, it's routine for smarter webmasters not to
specify one particular font, but to offer a series of options from best
to worst, thus:
Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, Helv, sans-serif
The browser will then do its best to honor the best available option
(leftmost on the list), and if none of the named fonts are installed, it
will fall back to one of the sans-serif fonts it does have.
Sometimes the browser's substitutions are inappropriate, but the web
page designer can load the dice in his favor as noted above. For
example, one site I know chose to use that Brush Script MT mentioned
upthread, and a friendly visitor advised the webmaster not to use Comic
Sans, saying it was inappropriate to that application. Of course, the
webmaster hadn't specified Comic Sans, or even considered it; the
visitor's browser had substituted it because it didn't have Brush Script
MT. The webmaster had to tweak his css to make that substitution unlikely.
By the same token, if the user has his browser configured cooperatively
to heed the advice of the web page, he will have better luck than if he
absolutely insists on displaying everything in his favorite font. But
even then, if his favorite font is a very complete one such as Arial
Unicode MS, he'll have pretty good luck. But if he wants to view a page
in, say, Burmese, he'll have to use a font that supports Burmese.
You're right about mixing and matching, provided the user's settings
permit it. In a discussion on a translators' mailing list, I was asked
how to distinguish Japanese from Korean by ear, and I responded in part
that Korean distinguishes a high back rounded vowel [u] from a high back
unrounded vowel [ɯ], but Japanese has only the latter, so if you hear
[u] as in "tool" it cannot be Japanese. My installation is configured to
display plain-text emails in Courier New, which does not have the
character "ɯ," so it used a different font, making it stick out like a
sore thumb, but at least it was recognizable. For my purpose, it worked,
but if I were designing a website, I'd do my best to convince the
visitor to use a font that contained that character, so as to avoid such
sore thumbs.
--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
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