Re: Pb with Unicode Tifinagh with Internet Explorer

From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Sun May 24 2009 - 11:48:03 CDT

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    Azzedine Ait Khelifa wrote:

    > It seem the Unicode Bloc : Tifinagh (U+2D30 à U+2D6F) is not
    > available with Internet Explorer.
    > It's working fine with firefox.

    Tifinagh has very limited font support, see
    http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2d30/fontsupport.htm
    In practice, Tifinagh characters won't be visible unless the system has some
    of the special fonts Code2000, DejaVu Sans, or MPH 2B Damase (not included
    in any normal software shipment, as far as I know) or may some other special
    font that hasn't been recorded on that page.

    In addition to this, Internet Explorer has font selection problems. It is
    often unable to display a character (and e.g. shows a boxed question mark or
    a small box instead), even though a glyph for it exists in the system. This
    seems to be the case for Tifinagh characters, too. If I write a web page
    with ⴰ in it, even IE 8 shows a boxed "?", unless I do something
    special.

    The something special is a CSS rule that explicitly suggests a font
    containing those characters. For example (assuming you wish to use Cambria
    as the primary font, just for definiteness):
    body { font-family: Cambria, Georgia, Code2000, "DejaVu Sans", "MPH 2B
    Damase"; }

    It would be even safer to use some markup for any piece of text in Tifinagh
    and assign the CSS rule to only such pieces, e.g.
    <span class="tifinagh">&#x2d30;&x2d40;</span>
    with CSS rule
    .tifinagh { font-family: Code2000, "DejaVu Sans", "MPH 2B Damase"; }

    Of course this won't help if none of the special fonts is installed on a
    user's system.

    Although it is usually bad style to refer to technicalities, here it might
    be necessary, if you wish to use Tifinagh characters on a web page. Yoi
    might consider a note like the following:

    This page contains Tifinagh characters, which are not included in commonly
    used fonts. To see the characters, download and install the <a
    href=http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/>DejaVu Sans</a> font or the <a
    href="http://www.code2000.net">Code2000</a> font.

    I'd use that order, because DejaVu fonts are fee (Code2000 is not, though
    it's cheap=

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


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