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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 09/19/07 06:09
Scripsit Animesh K:
>> This page shows fine in FF or Opera. Safari/IE7.0 put slightly bigger
>> replacement characters. And IE 6.0 just fails.
>>
>> I guess Trebuchet MS lacks the diacritics fonts.
Your wording is odd, since you confuse fonts with characters or glyphs and
diacritics with letters containing them, but you are basically right:
Trebuchet MS lacks glyphs for some of the characters used on the page, such
as n with dot above. Therefore, browsers either display a symbol denoting an
unrepresentable character or pick up a character from another font. (A
clever browser could construct a representation, by decomposing a character
into a base character and a combining diacritic mark. This would be quite in
accordance with the Unicode standard, but it's probably high above the heads
of browser designers, even though it would be almost trivial to implement.)
> And here the same text displays fine in IE 6.0 with Tahoma
>
> http://www.stutimandal.com/new/poemgen.php?id=33
Maybe it does, maybe it does not. On my computer, Tahoma contains n with dot
above, so I see the text in one font. On someone else's computer, maybe not.
Maybe their computer lacks Tahoma, or maybe their Tahoma is different. At
least the page
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1e45/fontsupport.htm
does not list Tahoma as one of the fonts supporting that character.
The secondary font suggested on the page, Times, is among the worst possible
choices. The Times font, where available (it's _not_ the same as Times New
Roman!) tends to contain a very small set of characters. On my computer, for
example, Times is a Type 1 font supporting little more than the Windows
Latin 1 repertoire - e.g., even Latin 2 characters are missing.
Moreover, Tahoma is basically condensed Verdana, suffering from the same
problems as Verdana _and_ from the condensation problem (though in some
situations, for some people, being condensed might be an asset). That is,
Tahoma has the same basic shapes of characters but horizontally denser. You
might try to approach this issue by using letter-spacing: 1px to make Tahoma
less dense.
So something like
font-family: Arial Unicode MS, Tahoma, Code2000, Everson Mono Unicode
would be better. (The letter-spacing idea is not good here, since CSS does
not let you say "if Tahoma is used, then...", so any letter-spacing set
would apply no matter which font is used.)
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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