Re: Deseret Unicode

From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Tue Apr 26 2005 - 01:52:55 CST

  • Next message: Otto Stolz: "Re: String name and Character Name"

    On Mon, 25 Apr 2005, Curtis Clark wrote:

    > Doug Ewell said the following on 2005-04-25 21:47:
    > > Most style sheets end their font-family lists with "serif" or
    > > "sans-serif," and I think if it gets to that point, the browser can be
    > > considered to have done its job if it picks (respectively) any old serif
    > > or sans-serif font its heart desires.
    >
    > Actually, it is user-selectable, and at least in the case of Firefox, on
    > somewhat of a per-language basis.

    On Opera, too. But there are two kinds of settings, unless I've missed
    something:
    a) mapping serif, sans-serif etc. to specific fonts
    b) selecting the font to be used when a page makes no font suggestion
       (even using a generic font name) or when the browser has been set
       to ignore such suggestions.
    The latter is possible on IE, too, and the default font can be set
    differently for different writing systems. Presumably, this means that
    when processing text with no font suggestions, the browser determines
    which writing system each character belongs to and selects a font
    accordingly. Things are probably rather confusing and confused when
    we get into details. For example, the second kind of settings might
    look like being for _language_ dependent settings; and to add to the
    confusion, it probably partly _is_ dependent on the declared language.

    I've noticed that if I set e.g. lang="ru" for a piece of text containing
    Russian as transliterated (in Latin letters), browsers may think (from the
    lang attribute) that the text must be in Cyrillic letters, so they use
    the font selected for Cyrillic script. This is somewhat understandable,
    since browsers cannot really recognize the writing system - they need
    to make a guess.

    -- 
    Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Apr 26 2005 - 01:55:16 CST