From: James Kass (jameskass@att.net)
Date: Fri Apr 22 2005 - 20:12:53 CST
Magda Danish wrote,
> Thanks to John Jenkins, we now have "What is Unicode?" in the Deseret alphabet"
> at
> http://www.unicode.org/standard/translations/deseret.html
>
> This page can be viewed on a MAC but not on machines with Windows OS. Sorry!
Of course Deseret Unicode text can be viewed on Windows.
For example, the page displays just fine in the Opera browser.
There are two factors involved which prevent this page from being
displayed.
The first is that the text is in UTF-8. Some browsers on Windows can
handle this just fine, but Internet Explorer can't. An Internet Explorer
user can "Save As" user defined. This converts the UTF-8 material to
NCRs.
The second factor is that the STYLE sheet used with many of the
"What is Unicode?" pages forces some browsers to use inappropriate
fonts. If the selected fonts don't cover the Unicode range of the
text itself, it isn't surprising that the text doesn't display.
In the case of this Deseret page, the first choice for fonts in various
sections is either "Arial" or "Century Schoolbook", neither of which
cover Deseret. Opening the file "standard_styles.css" and changing
the font names to something appropriate will enable the page to
display. (This only works if you save the web page "complete" and
you can only edit the copy on your own system.)
Similar display problems exist with the recently added Ethiopic script
pages. All of the Unicode 4.1 characters display as "missing glyph"
boxes here, even though I have an appropriate font installed.
Other popular pages, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
pages in many languages, suffer the same display fate with regards
to "missing glyph" squares appearing needlessly in the display.
In my humble opinion, the best practice is to *not* specify fonts
in multilingual text pages unless it is assured that *all* users have
access to the *same version* of the specified font. Otherwise there
will be display problems.
Best regards,
James Kass
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