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Posted by Dung Ping on 02/22/06 17:21
Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> "Dung Ping" <dungping5@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Its name is 'syllabic'.
>
> I'm afraid the identity of the character is uncertain.
>
> > Its shape is a small vertical bar. Its
> > unicode is 031E, decimal is 789.
>
> U+031E is COMBINING DOWN TACK BELOW, which does not match your prose
> description. In IPA, it indicates vowel lowering or opening.
>
> Decimal 789 is hexadecimal 315, but U+0315 is COMBINING COMMA ABOVE
> RIGHT, so I don't think that's your character either.
>
> > When preceded by a letter, it
> > will appear underneath it, to indicate the letter is a syllable by
> > itself.
>
> Then you most probably mean the character U+0329 COMBINING VERTICAL
> LINE BELOW. It is named according to its shape in Unicode, but a
> comment in the Unicode code chart says: "IPA: syllabic".
>
> > But neither the unicode nor decimal work on my web page. They
> > appear as small square. At the css font-family, I entered 'lucida
> > sans unicode'.
>
> As usual, the URL of your attempt would have been useful. There are
> _so_ many things that can go wrong.
>
> In principle, you can just write ̩ in HTML and expect browsers to
> handle the rest. In practice, there are several problems:
> - some browsers don't recognize such references (and using a decimal
> reference, ̩, would give a slightly wider coverage)
> - not all fonts contain a glyph for the character
> - very few browsers can correctly produce a rendering where the
> diacritic appears suitably positioned, though many browsers manage to
> produce some reasonable rendering in simple cases (no multiple
> diacritics, no descenders in the base character).
>
> Opinions disagree on whether it would be beneficial to use CSS to
> suggest some font(s) that might contain the character; I won't repeat
> the pros and cons here.
>
> The fileformat.info site is usually a good place to get a rough idea of
> font support to characters. However, the information at
> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0329/fontsupport.htm
> is questionable. The Lucida Sans Unicode font is not listed there, and
> neither is Arial Unicode MS.
>
> My tests, with
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/test/syllabic
> suggest that the results vary a lot. Fonts exist in different versions,
> and the implementation of diacritics varies a lot. For example, on one
> computer, using IE 6, I get
> - a box overprinted on the letter when Tahoma is used
> - the letter with no diacritic when Lucida Sans Unicode is used
> - the diacritic printed on the right, producing a symbol that looks
> very much like the letter eng (or the Greek small letter eta in some
> shapes), when Arial Unicode MS is used.
>
> Thus, none of the results is acceptable. On IE 7 beta, I get the letter
> with some diacritic below it for all three fonts, but only the Arial
> Unicode MS version looks right. The Lucida Sans Unicode diacritic looks
> very much like a dot, and the Tahoma diacritic is misplaced.
>
> The conclusion is that in HTML authoring for the WWW, the use of IPA
> diacritics is very risky. Users may see a mess, or no diacritic, or a
> wrong diacritic, or a quite wrongly positioned diacritic, or (probably
> rather rarely) a tolerable version. At least I would recommend
> - _not_ setting the font in HTML or CSS
> - informing users about fonts that might work for them (with a
> suggestion to use their browser's tool for setting the default font)
> - including a short test text with an image representing a correct
> rendering alongside with it.
> Actually, if I did something like that, I might even consider adding a
> suitable piece of JavaScript for setting the font of the texts
> containing IPA, using a simple dropdown menu. This would be convenient
> to people who dare to use a browser with JavaScript enabled, at least
> on pages that explain what _useful_ they do with it. If users have to
> set the _overall_ font of the page, in browser settings, they typically
> have to do that rather inconveniently, and they also need to change the
> default font back to something more suitable for general browsing.
>
> --
> Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
> Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html
Hi Jukka:
Thanks a lot for your detailed explanation. I got the IPA information
from:
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-unicode.htm
It turned out that the code was from the row below that for the
'syllabic' symbol.
My testing shows:
The Arial Unicode MS works best on Firefox browser, but does not show
up on IE5. The Lucida Sans Unicode font is displaced a little on both
IE and FF. The Tahoma font is substantially displaced on both the IE5
and FF. I decide to use the Lucida Sans Unicode font in my page, as
there will be svg animation in it which must be opened with IE.
Again, your expertise and help are greatly appreciated.
http://www.pinyinology.com/planning/syllabic.html
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