From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Nov 21 2004 - 16:10:31 CST
From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
> The best advice for Elaine's situation becomes simpler. To maximize the
> likelihood that readers will see the right glyphs, add a "font-family"
> style line that lists a variety of available fonts, in decreasing order
> of coverage and attractiveness.
My "bad advice" comes effectively from the confusion about two SIL related
fonts: one with legacy encoding (handled in browsers as if it was ISO-8859-1
encoded, so that you need to insert text in the HTML page using only the
code points in the Latin-1 page starting at U+0000, even though they do not
represent the correct Unicode characters), and the other coded with Unicode
(for which you need to encode your text with Habrew code points...).
But your advice, Doug, still won't work when multiple fonts in the
font-family style use distinct encodings: Mixing SIL Ezra with Arial, or
similar Unicode encoded fonts will never produce the intended fallbacks if
users don't have SIL Ezra effectively installed and selectable in their
browser environment.
Legacy encoded fonts only contain a codepage/charset identifier (most often
ISO-8859-1) and no character to glyph translation table; also don't work
properly with browsers configured for accessibility, where only the
user-defined prefered fonts are allowed, and fonts specified in HTML pages
must be ignored by the browser, user styles having been set to higher
priority (even if one uses the "important (!)" CSS style rule markers),
unless the default font mapping associated with the codepage/charset
identifier effectively corresponds to what would be found in a regular
char-to-glyph mapping table present in that font.
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