Re: Using Javascript to Detect Script Support in a Browser

From: cibu cj (cibucj@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Jun 15 2010 - 16:54:16 CDT

  • Next message: André Szabolcs Szelp: "Re: Refining the idea for the SignWriting proposal"

    Use a font with only one character, U+FFFE with a glyph of known width in
    displaying the measuring divs. The font may be specified using @font-face
    for these divs.

    Cibu

    On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:13 AM, Ed Trager <ed.trager@gmail.com> wrote:

    > Hi Unicoders,
    >
    > Suppose that we write Unicode text in a web page that we create. We
    > are worried that our viewers' computers lack a font for proper display
    > of the script in which our text is written. Obviously it will not be
    > good if our users only see square boxes or question marks instead of
    > the text that we want them to be able to see and read:
    >
    > □□□□□□□□□ ... <= Bad! :-(
    >
    > We want a solution to this problem.
    >
    > Until very recently, apparently the best we could do was to warn the
    > user of the possibility of unrenderable text. For example Wikipedia,
    > on pages related to Indic languages, says:
    >
    > “This article contains Indic text. Without proper rendering support,
    > you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing
    > conjuncts instead of Indic text.”
    >
    > But now that “good” browsers support @font-face, we can envision a
    > better solution: If the browser does not have a font for rendering a
    > specific script, we can dynamically supply one.
    >
    > I have written some simple Javascript to detect whether a user's web
    > browser can display Unicode text in a specific ISO 15924 script.
    > Here's how it works, using Javascript:
    >
    > * Create two divs on the page but set the CSS opacity to zero so
    > the user doesn't see them.
    > * In one div, place a relatively narrow letter from the target
    > script. For example, for Latin one might choose "i".
    > * In the other div, place a relatively wider letter from the target
    > script. For Latin, "w" is an obvious choice.
    > * If the width of the two divs is identical, then the letters were
    > rendered as square boxes or question marks.
    > * Otherwise, if the widths differ, then the browser has found a
    > system font capable of rendering the text.
    >
    > In the case of a negative result where the widths are the same, we can
    > then dynamically add an @font-face rule to the page to download an
    > appropriate font. I have an experimental web application that already
    > does exactly this to support Tai Tham (Lanna) script. As Lanna is a
    > fairly recent addition to Unicode, only a very few people will have a
    > Lanna font available on their machines.
    >
    > Astute unicoders on this list will probably already have recognized
    > one or more shortcomings of this method. This method works perfectly
    > for most scripts, but of course it fails for monospaced scripts like
    > Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Yi, and possibly some others like Phags Pa.
    >
    > For monospaced scripts, I tried doing this:
    >
    > * In the first div put U+FFFE. Every browser I tested rendered
    > U+FFFE as a square box.
    > * In the second div put a representative character from the
    > script, such as "中" or "文" for Chinese.
    >
    > In theory, the U+FFFE will always be rendered as a box with a fixed
    > width, and one would expect that there is a fairly good probability
    > that the fixed width of any Chinese font on the machine will not be
    > exactly the same as the width of the fallback square box.
    >
    > But in practice, based on my tests, this does not work. One problem
    > is that Firefox's fallback square boxes contain the Unicode code point
    > hex digits -- and these fallback square boxes can actually be of
    > different widths depending on the hex codes contained therein. Also
    > it might just happen that the fixed width of the Chinese glyph is
    > exactly the same width as that of the fallback box used to render the
    > U+FFFE.
    >
    > It would be very nice to come up with a reliable solution for scripts
    > that are traditionally monospaced. Does anyone have any brilliant
    > ideas?
    >
    > - Ed Trager
    >
    >
    >



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jun 15 2010 - 16:58:08 CDT