Cyrillic

[Philipp Lenssen]

Does anybody have experience displaying Cyrillic in common browsers
with common settings?

I found the following page researching the topic, however I cannot
display all characters in the table (IE6, either automatic encoding
detection, or forced Cyrillic encoding):

<http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cyrillic.html>

For example, the first character in the table ("Cyrillic Capital Letter
Ie With Grave") will display as default-box (what IExplorer does when
it can't display the character).

Thanks for pointers!

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

/Philipp Lenssen/:

Does anybody have experience displaying Cyrillic in common browsers
with common settings?

I found the following page researching the topic, however I cannot
display all characters in the table (IE6, either automatic encoding
detection, or forced Cyrillic encoding):

<http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cyrillic.html>

For example, the first character in the table ("Cyrillic Capital Letter
Ie With Grave") will display as default-box (what IExplorer does when
it can't display the character).

Seems like the characters you point are not present in the fonts I
have installed on my system. Strangely enough Mozilla finds
substitutes for most of them and I see them just fine with Mozilla.

For IE6 to display a character it should be present in the font
which font face is currently selected. There are some exclusions
like the Greek letters and couple of symbol characters which are
displayed with a fixed font face no matter what is currently
selected ("Symbol" is used for the Greek letters).

--
Stanimir

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Does anybody have experience displaying Cyrillic in common browsers
with common settings?
Cue A.Prilop?

Meantime I'll ask a question. Which font do you have configured for
*Latin* in tools -> internet options -> fonts ?
<http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cyrillic.html>

For example, the first character in the table ("Cyrillic Capital Letter
Ie With Grave") will display as default-box (what IExplorer does when
it can't display the character).

Same here. Clue: WGL4. But try changing your Latin font selection
experimentally to Tahoma and see what happens. It works for me.

Mozilla is a lot better in this regard

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...ers-fonts.html

cheers

[Andreas Prilop]

On 4 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

I found the following page researching the topic, however I cannot
display all characters in the table (IE6, either automatic encoding
detection, or forced Cyrillic encoding):
<http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cyrillic.html>
I suggest "the other Alan". ;-)
<http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/unicode/unidata04.html>
You see, <http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/arabic.html> doesn't
prove anything at all. Arabic requires the use of different glyphs
and a writing direction from right to left. Alan Wood's page
doesn't deal with this features at all. So he is mislead to
conclude that, for example, Macintosh iCab can display both
Arabic and Hebrew. In fact, iCab is completely unfit for Arabic
or Hebrew.
<http://www.google.com/groups?q=iCab+Arabic+author:Prilop>
For example, the first character in the table ("Cyrillic Capital Letter
Ie With Grave") will display as default-box (what IExplorer does when
it can't display the character).

The MacEdonian letters with grave accent are recent additions to
Unicode and are missing from most fonts. My understanding is that
they are not required for normal writing (and hence missing in
ISO-8859-5) but are used only in dictionaries and the like.

--
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What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

[Philipp Lenssen]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Does anybody have experience displaying Cyrillic in common browsers
with common settings?

Meantime I'll ask a question. Which font do you have configured for
*Latin* in tools -> internet options -> fonts ?
Arial...
I always switch to Arial from the default Times New Roman.

<http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cyrillic.html>

For example, the first character in the table ("Cyrillic Capital
Letter Ie With Grave") will display as default-box (what IExplorer
does when it can't display the character).
Same here. Clue: WGL4. But try changing your Latin font selection
experimentally to Tahoma and see what happens. It works for me.

Hmm, then I can indeed display the first character, and many others.
But there are still some missing.
Mozilla is a lot better in this regard

Thanks, however we would need to support both IExplorer and Mozilla
(Netscape 7 et al).

Of course, I'm not really looking for a solution on my system/ browser,
rather a way to provide the best possible solution for a typical user
reading Cyrillic. I did ask for someone reading Cyrillic to test it,
but that still leaves me with trying to provide the best possible page
for the test.

Which character encoding would I serve? UTF-8?

--
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http://blog.outer-court.com

[Philipp Lenssen]

Andreas Prilop wrote:

On 4 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

I found the following page researching the topic, however I cannot
display all characters in the table (IE6, either automatic encoding
detection, or forced Cyrillic encoding):
<http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cyrillic.html>

I suggest "the other Alan". ;-)
<http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/unicode/unidata04.html>

Thanks, nice table. I can see about 60% of the characers. I suppose
someone with a typical browser set up to browse Cyrillic pages would
see more or even all of them... that would be interesting to know for
me.

--
Google Blogoscoped
http://blog.outer-court.com

[Andreas Prilop]

On 4 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Of course, I'm not really looking for a solution on my system/ browser,
rather a way to provide the best possible solution for a typical user
reading Cyrillic.
"User reading Cyrillic"? What's that? Do you mean Russian text?
Or Bulgarian text? Or Ukrainian text?
I did ask for someone reading Cyrillic to test it,
but that still leaves me with trying to provide the best possible page
for the test.
Take these pages for testing:
<http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/cyrillic.html5>
<http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/cyrillic.win>
<http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/multilingual1.html#cyrillic>
Which character encoding would I serve? UTF-8?

What do you actually want to achieve?

--
Top-posting.
What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

[Andreas Prilop]

On 4 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Thanks, nice table. I can see about 60% of the characers. I suppose
someone with a typical browser set up to browse Cyrillic pages would
see more or even all of them... that would be interesting to know for
me.

I doubt anyone is up "browsing Cyrillic pages". There are people
reading Russian, people reading Bulgarian, etc. Specify your
language(s)!

--
Top-posting.
What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Arial...
I always switch to Arial from the default Times New Roman.
Have you understood the part which relates to IE in
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...ers-fonts.html ?

(if you /have/ understood it, then you're doing better than me -
I'm only doing my best to report my practical observations, with some
guesses about the underlying machinery.)

Point 1: naming your font as "Arial" does not fix the repertoire.
There are several different versions of the "Arial" font, covering
very different repertoires.

Point 2: *if* you know that the user has a particularly good (and
properly made) Cyrillic, font then you could select it, e.g via
stylesheet - **BUT** in a WWW context you have no idea whether users
have this font, and most attempts to force the issue can result in a
-worse- rendering for some proportion of readers. I *don't* recommend
trying to set a named font, nor even a list of named fonts, in this
situation, as I say:
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...onts.html#dont

Same here. Clue: WGL4. But try changing your Latin font selection
experimentally to Tahoma and see what happens. It works for me.

Hmm, then I can indeed display the first character, and many others.
But there are still some missing.

For me also, with any of the usual fonts. I do have some fonts where
all of the proportional samples (Code2000) and almost all of the
monospace samples ("Monospace") are rendered, but they aren't the
world's most aesthetic fonts!!
Of course, I'm not really looking for a solution on my system/ browser,
That's understood, of course. Your browser is only being used as a
test case in this exercise ;-)
rather a way to provide the best possible solution for a typical user
reading Cyrillic.
It might be hoped that if they were "typical" users reading Cyrillic
then they would have taken whatever action was appropriate to improve
the character coverage of their browser. Maybe install any specific
language support for IE/Windows (did you try that yourself?) or look
for appropriate fonts (let's hope they don't stumble on those old
8-bit fake fonts...).
Which character encoding would I serve?

The locals seem collectively to have decided to use Windows-125x for
whichever value of x is appropriate to their language. There's a
certain irony in that, but I won't dwell on it (I'm sure Andreas will
want to comment, though ;-)

But I'd recommend utf-8 for serving to any halfways-modern browser
now. Even Netscape 4 - as long as they don't need to submit any
forms :-{

[DU]

Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Does anybody have experience displaying Cyrillic in common browsers
with common settings?

I found the following page researching the topic, however I cannot
display all characters in the table (IE6, either automatic encoding
detection, or forced Cyrillic encoding):

<http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cyrillic.html>

For example, the first character in the table ("Cyrillic Capital Letter
Ie With Grave") will display as default-box (what IExplorer does when
it can't display the character).

Thanks for pointers!

1- I strongly suggest you get Microsoft True Type Font Extensions (name:
ttfext.exe size: 478KB) from microsoft.com/typography
This utility will tell you thanks to a right-click/Properties on an
installed fonts which charsets can be rendered with such font.

2- In MSIE 6, do
Tools/Internet Options.../Fonts button/Language Script: select/Cyrillic/
and then choose among your installed fonts a default font which will
render Cyrillic accordingly. This is where you can make proper setting.
The problem with this small window interface is that you can not see all
Cyrillic characters as they are rendered but only 8 characters.

3- A properly coded webpage and a properly configured server will very
rarely cause language or character set rendering problem to an user
using a modern browser (e.g.: MSIE 6, Mozilla 1.x, Opera 7.x, Safari
1.x, etc).

DU

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, DU wrote:

1- I strongly suggest you get Microsoft True Type Font Extensions (name:
ttfext.exe size: 478KB) from microsoft.com/typography
Agreed.
This utility will tell you thanks to a right-click/Properties on an
installed fonts which charsets can be rendered with such font.
Well, it'll tell you that your Arial supports Cyrillic. It won't tell
you how badly. And this is the trap with IE, since - once it's
selected a font for a particular unicode range - it seems it has no
way of going back and filling in the missing characters from another
font, in the way that e.g Mozilla does.

I'd recommend getting at least a font browser utility like Listfont
http://heiner-eichmann.de/software/l...t/listfont.htm
(use its "show unicode font" button).
2- In MSIE 6, do
Tools/Internet Options.../Fonts button/Language Script: select/Cyrillic/
and then choose among your installed fonts a default font which will
render Cyrillic accordingly.
In my experience, this won't help - unless your choice of Latin-based
font does *not* support Cyrillic.[1]
3- A properly coded webpage and a properly configured server will very
rarely cause language or character set rendering problem
You haven't been reading Usenet, then.
using a modern browser

^^^^^^

Maybe that's the problem with IE6 :-}

have fun

[1] disclaimer - all my tests were done on an IE/Windows that had
been installed for a Latin locale, and testing nothing newer than
Win/2000 Pro yet.

[DU]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, DU wrote:

1- I strongly suggest you get Microsoft True Type Font Extensions (name:
ttfext.exe size: 478KB) from microsoft.com/typography

Agreed.

This utility will tell you thanks to a right-click/Properties on an
installed fonts which charsets can be rendered with such font.

Well, it'll tell you that your Arial supports Cyrillic. It won't tell
you how badly.

I did not suggest that such support was impeccable or flawless. Language
packs may be installed too in order to "extend" the support of a font
for other languages: that is the case with Arial. Codepage conversions
may have to be declared too in the windows XP regional and language
advanced options.

And this is the trap with IE, since - once it's selected a font for a particular unicode range - it seems it has no
way of going back and filling in the missing characters from another
font, in the way that e.g Mozilla does.

I'd recommend getting at least a font browser utility like Listfont
http://heiner-eichmann.de/software/l...t/listfont.htm
(use its "show unicode font" button).

2- In MSIE 6, do
Tools/Internet Options.../Fonts button/Language Script: select/Cyrillic/
and then choose among your installed fonts a default font which will
render Cyrillic accordingly.

In my experience, this won't help - unless your choice of Latin-based
font does *not* support Cyrillic.[1]

Defining how cyrillic in one's own browser should be handled (by which
fonts) can help. Changes in language should be indicated in the markup too.
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/...ed-and-foreign

3- A properly coded webpage and a properly configured server will very
rarely cause language or character set rendering problem

You haven't been reading Usenet, then.

Reading Usenet is rather a large task to accomplish, you know. Even for
just a few newsgroups related to font, html and web authoring. I don't
have any clue as to how to interpret your statement or what you meant to
say. Your reply, as worded, could suggest that improperly coded webpage
and improperly configured server rarely cause language or character set
rendering problems.

using a modern browser

^^^^^^

Maybe that's the problem with IE6 :-}

Mozilla causes far less problems than MSIE 6 in this particular area...
if that is what you meant to say, I agree. :-}

DU

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, DU wrote:

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

2- In MSIE 6, do
Tools/Internet Options.../Fonts button/Language Script: select/Cyrillic/
and then choose among your installed fonts a default font which will
render Cyrillic accordingly.
In my experience, this won't help - unless your choice of Latin-based
font does *not* support Cyrillic.[1]
I made what appears to be a definite factual statement - at least it's
based on my own tests and observations. If you can refute it, then
I'm interested to learn.
Defining how cyrillic in one's own browser should be handled (by which
fonts) can help.
Please try this test along with me and see how it accords with your
experience. Use IE to visit this page
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...unidata04.html (which will
use whatever default font(s) your browser chooses for this situation).

Now visit the tools -> internet options -> fonts UI, and set your font
selection for Latin-based to, let's say, "Arial Black", and set your
selection for Cyrillic to, let's say, "Times New Roman". Close the UI
and observe the display. I'm seeing the cyrillic letters displayed in
Arial Black (not T.N.R).

Re-open the font dialog and change the Latin-based font to "Arial",
without changing the Cyrillic selection. Close the UI. I'm seeing
the cyrillic letters displayed in Arial (not T.N.R).

Now find a font[1] which does _not_ support Cyrillic: I used "Albertus
Extra Bold". Choose that as your Latin-based font. And now I'm
seeing the Cyrillic characters using the T.N.R font which I had
selected.

"Hence or otherwise deduce..." the conclusion which I drew in my page.
Changes in language should be indicated in the markup too.
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/...ed-and-foreign
Maybe you'd like to play your part in this, and demonstrate how adding
an appropriate language markup to the page does (or does not) change
the behaviour of IE. Deal?

But as my page reports (the information was supplied by J.Korpela), IE
*does* seem to take particular 8-bit character codings as hints to
choose an associated font selection, even though we saw no evidence of
it responding to language markup.

3- A properly coded webpage and a properly configured server will very
rarely cause language or character set rendering problem

Let's call that assertion "Exhibit A".
You haven't been reading Usenet, then.

Reading Usenet is rather a large task to accomplish, you know. Even for
just a few newsgroups related to font, html and web authoring. I don't
have any clue as to how to interpret your statement

Alright then, in clear text: 'what you have posted leads me to believe
that you're not familiar enough with the situation to be able to make
such a definite statement as "Exhibit A" implies'.
or what you meant to say. Your reply, as worded, could suggest that
improperly coded webpage and improperly configured server rarely
cause language or character set rendering problems.

You're surely not trying to be deliberately perverse, or are you?

Properly coded web pages and web server have all too often led to
reports of character rendering problems by others who were using IE.
Especially USAns, who apparently hadn't seen fit to install the
multi-language option, let alone installing support for any particular
additional languages.

My cited web page has details, or at least they're in one of my
associated web pages somewhere.

have fun

[1]You can discern this by using your "MS font properties extension"
and looking at the "charset/Unicode" tab.

[Michaelo]

Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Does anybody have experience displaying Cyrillic in common browsers
with common settings?
Well.
I think normal modern browser
(if during installation was not excluded default lingual support)
must display Cyrillic.
I read ukrainian texts in Kraków (Poland) in small internet - say -
club.
Where, I guess, ukrainians do not come (I am not quite Ukrainian :).
So even there was installed Cyrillic.

So EI's Cyrillic correctly display Russian and Belorussian.

To make browsers automatically determine code set, you should note in in
HTML code,
or in your HTTP dæmon.

By the way are two popular Cyrillic codesets for Ukrainian and Russian.
win-1251
KOI-8 (few variations)
there was two more.

Also you can use standard transliteration, Polish, Czech or German
spelling.

Finally some letters are the same in Cyrillic and Romanic,
some resembles each other, you may try to assemble word of them.

XTO TAM CTOÏTb?
(Who are staying there ?)
Better with capital letters.

ANd one more solution you can put picture on your site,
or compose words with pictures of letters syllabs and other jointed
letters.


I found the following page researching the topic, however I cannot
display all characters in the table (IE6, either automatic encoding
detection, or forced Cyrillic encoding):

<http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cyrillic.html>

For example, the first character in the table ("Cyrillic Capital Letter
Ie With Grave") will display as default-box (what IExplorer does when
it can't display the character).

Thanks for pointers!

[Philipp Lenssen]

Andreas Prilop wrote:

"User reading Cyrillic"? What's that? Do you mean Russian text?
Or Bulgarian text? Or Ukrainian text?

What do you actually want to achieve?

I suppose part of my question is trying to figue that out.
I guess I want to display pages for Russian users!
My manager handed me this task: "We want to display pages in Cyrillic
soon. Please tell us how to do that and if there are any problems."
I asked for a sample text, and a specific user testing this in the
target market, which turns out to be a Russian.

So I suppose I will copy the characters from the Word Document into
Notepadd (my own Netpadd can't handle UTF-8 at the moment), and deliver
character-enconding UTF-8 via the HTTP-header. Furthermore I will set
the font to Arial as this is the guideline for the web site and does
seem to work just OK.

Thanks for the help so far.

--
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[Andreas Prilop]

On 7 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

I guess I want to display pages for Russian users!
My manager handed me this task: "We want to display pages in Cyrillic
soon. Please tell us how to do that and if there are any problems."
So you need only Russian Cyrillic characters but no fancy Macedonian
or Abkhaz letters. That's much easier.
I asked for a sample text, and a specific user testing this in the
target market, which turns out to be a Russian.
Here again:
<http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/cyrillic.html5>
Furthermore I will set
the font to Arial as this is the guideline for the web site and does
seem to work just OK.

Do whatever you like in *your own backyard^W browser*.
*Do* *not* specify the typeface Arial in your webpage/stylesheet!
<http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/browsers-fonts.html#dont>
Note that a font "Arial" *need* *not* contain any Cyrillic letters
on the reader's system. _You_ may have a system where Arial contains
Cyrillic letters but this is not true on non-Microsoft systems
and not true even on certain MS Windows installations.

Leave the choice of the Cyrillic typeface to the reader!

--
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What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

[Philipp Lenssen]

Andreas Prilop wrote:

On 7 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

I guess I want to display pages for Russian users!
My manager handed me this task: "We want to display pages in
Cyrillic soon. Please tell us how to do that and if there are any
problems."
So you need only Russian Cyrillic characters but no fancy Macedonian
or Abkhaz letters. That's much easier.

Good...

Leave the choice of the Cyrillic typeface to the reader!

But what if our customer's corporate design guidelines make Arial
necessary?
Is a choice of e.g. the CSS...
body { font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; }
.... going to hurt Russian users (i.e. break characters)?
Would I fare better with ...
body { font-family: sans-serif; }
.... so that in typical settings one would still get Arial or something
Arial-like?
Thanks!

--
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[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

But what if our customer's corporate design guidelines make Arial
necessary?
If the corporate design guidelines are more "necessary" than the
ability to reliably read the content, don't you think there's
something wrong?
Is a choice of e.g. the CSS...
body { font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; }
... going to hurt Russian users (i.e. break characters)?

In theory it should work. Unfortunately, IE doesn't always
conform to theory...

In these limited circumstances, I suspect you'll get away with it,
since the font isn't likely to claim support for Cyrillic unless it at
least covers some minimal Russian character repertoire. And if the
font doesn't claim support for Cyrillic, then IE will use some other
font for that part of the repertoire. But Andreas is right to warn
you: there *is* some risk involved, where IE is concerned.

[Neal]

On 8 Jun 2004 10:11:44 GMT, Philipp Lenssen <in**@outer-court.com> wrote:

But what if our customer's corporate design guidelines make Arial
necessary?

Then perhaps company policy is out of step with the technical realities of
the media?

[Philipp Lenssen]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

But what if our customer's corporate design guidelines make Arial
necessary?

If the corporate design guidelines are more "necessary" than the
ability to reliably read the content, don't you think there's
something wrong?

I can read Cyrillic/ Russan with my Arial font. So if there's something
like a trade-off (e.g. 90% chance it will display right with Arial, vs.
95% it will display with any font defaulting on the user system), then
the company might choose to push the preferred design. E.g. we are also
using Flash, which is a similar trade-off; maybe 95% may see the
animations, and 5% or so are lost.

Is a choice of e.g. the CSS...
body { font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; }
... going to hurt Russian users (i.e. break characters)?

In theory it should work. Unfortunately, IE doesn't always
conform to theory...

In these limited circumstances, I suspect you'll get away with it,
since the font isn't likely to claim support for Cyrillic unless it at
least covers some minimal Russian character repertoire. And if the
font doesn't claim support for Cyrillic, then IE will use some other
font for that part of the repertoire. But Andreas is right to warn
you: there is some risk involved, where IE is concerned.

Thanks. We will try it using above style...

--
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[Andreas Prilop]

On 8 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

But what if our customer's corporate design guidelines make Arial
necessary?
Arial is corporate design?? Quelle horreur!
Is a choice of e.g. the CSS...
body { font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; }
... going to hurt Russian users (i.e. break characters)?
AFAIK, there is no typeface Helvetica with Cyrillic characters.
Adobe and Linotype have a typeface "Helvetica Cyrillic":
<http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/P/P_361.jhtml>
<http://www.linotype.com/9402/helveticacyrillicupright-font.html>
Imagine that someone has no Arial whatsoever but Helvetica with
Latin characters only.

You _might_ specify:
font-family: 'Helvetica Cyrillic', 'Arial Cyrillic', 'Arial Cyr',
sans-serif
Would I fare better with ...
body { font-family: sans-serif; }
... so that in typical settings one would still get Arial or something
Arial-like?

Yes. And management won't notice since Internet Explorer defaults
to Arial when you specify "sans-serif". :-)

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What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

[Andreas Prilop]

On 8 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

using Flash, which is a similar trade-off; maybe 95% may see the
animations,
The kids?
and 5% or so are lost.

Serious customers?

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What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

[Paul Gorodyansky]

DU wrote:

...
Well, it'll tell you that your Arial supports Cyrillic. It won't tell
you how badly.
I did not suggest that such support was impeccable or flawless. Language
packs may be installed too in order to "extend" the support of a font
for other languages: that is the case with Arial.

Just FYI: it was the case several years ago :)
Nowadays - as long as we talk about MS Windows platform -
fonts such Arial _already_ contain 'extended' characters -
under Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP.
In older systems - Windows 95/98/ME - one needed to install
"MS Multilanguage Support" via Control Panel to do so:
http://RusWin.net/cyr9x.htm

Codepage conversions may have to be declared too in the windows
XP regional and language advanced options.

Not in my experience, at least for European languages such as Russian.
Browsers happily do needed conversions to show me say Russian KOI8-R
text by converting it to Windows-1251 text and use Windows 1251
fonts capabilities.
More details about fonts and encodings for Russian could be found
on my site...

--
Regards,
Paul Gorodyansky
"Cyrillic (Russian): instructions for Windows and Internet":
http://RusWin.net
Russian On-screen Keyboard: http://Kbd.RusWin.net
ó Õ×ÁÖÅÎÉÅÍ,
ðÁ×ÅÌ çÏÒÏÄÑÎÓËÉÊ
éÎÓÔÒÕËÃÉÉ: ÒÕÓÓËÉÊ ÐÏÄ Windows É × éÎÔÅÒÎÅÔÅ: http://RusWin.net

îÏ×ÙÊ ÓËÒÉÐÔ - òÕÓÓËÁÑ ÷ÉÒÔÕÁÌØÎÁÑ ëÌÁ×ÉÁÔÕÒÁ: http://Klava.RusWin.net

[Paul Gorodyansky]

Michaelo wrote:

Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Does anybody have experience displaying Cyrillic in common browsers
with common settings?
Well.
I think normal modern browser
(if during installation was not excluded default lingual support)
must display Cyrillic.
I read ukrainian texts in Kraków (Poland) in small internet - say -
club.
Where, I guess, ukrainians do not come (I am not quite Ukrainian :).
So even there was installed Cyrillic.

No, it was not _installed_ there. It's just Windows 2000 and later
_already_ have multilingual support for European languages, so
out-of-the-box US English Windows 2000 or Windows XP will show
Russian or Ukrainian or Polish or Greek Web page just fine even
in the Internet-cafe in Chicago :)
More details - in the Fonts and Encodings section of my site.
...
Finally some letters are the same in Cyrillic and Romanic,
some resembles each other, you may try to assemble word of them.

XTO TAM CTOÏTb?
(Who are staying there ?)
Better with capital letters.

:) If he tries to prpare such site for Russian customers they will
refuse to use it - at all...
The alphabet for Slavic languages is still Cyrillic :)
--
Regards,
Paul Gorodyansky
"Cyrillic (Russian): instructions for Windows and Internet":
http://RusWin.net
Russian On-screen Keyboard: http://Kbd.RusWin.net

[Nick Theodorakis]

On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 07:01:25 -0400, Neal <ne*****@yahoo.com> wrote:

On 8 Jun 2004 10:11:44 GMT, Philipp Lenssen <in**@outer-court.com> wrote:

But what if our customer's corporate design guidelines make Arial
necessary?

Then perhaps company policy is out of step with the technical realities of
the media?

Well, half in jest, (but only half), if the OP would just not set the
font face, and then tell the PHB that whatever s/he sees is how Arial
looks with Cyrillic fonts, will the PHB know?

Nick

--
Nick Theodorakis
ni**************@hotmail.com
nicholas_theodorakis [at] urmc [dot] rochester [dot] edu

[Philipp Lenssen]

Nick Theodorakis wrote:

On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 07:01:25 -0400, Neal <ne*****@yahoo.com> wrote:

On 8 Jun 2004 10:11:44 GMT, Philipp Lenssen <in**@outer-court.com>

wrote:

But what if our customer's corporate design guidelines make Arial
necessary?

Then perhaps company policy is out of step with the technical
realities of the media?

Well, half in jest, (but only half), if the OP would just not set the
font face, and then tell the PHB that whatever s/he sees is how Arial
looks with Cyrillic fonts, will the PHB know?

Ahem...

--
Google Blogoscoped
http://blog.outer-court.com

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

If the corporate design guidelines are more "necessary" than the
ability to reliably read the content, don't you think there's
something wrong?
I can read Cyrillic/ Russan with my Arial font.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You give the impression that you haven't been following the
discussion. The name of the font does not in itself define a
character repertoire. Just look at what MS did to their USA customers
with Win98, for one example. Do you imagine there's no-one in the USA
who can - or wants to - read Cyrillic? A certain vendor apparently
did, but do -you-?
So if there's something like a trade-off (e.g. 90% chance it will
display right with Arial, vs. 95% it will display with any font
defaulting on the user system), then the company might choose to
push the preferred design.
I can well believe that they would, but I still can't understand why a
company would want to associate itself with a lowest-common font from
a lowest-common supplier, while risking that it would incur objective
difficulties in communicating with some minority of potential
customers - those which one might categorise as their more-discerning
clientele. Maybe they have the idea that this will help them avoid
having to deal with discerning customers? If that's what it's about,
then I'm sure they could find more-effective ways of achieving -that-
aim!

I've given you my practical assessment (i.e that in practice I don't
think it'll cause -that- much harm), but when you come back and argue
along the lines that you do, I feel that I have to respond.
E.g. we are also using Flash, which is a similar trade-off; maybe
95% may see the animations, and 5% or so are lost.

Why so? Haven't "we" heard about graceful fallback?

[Philipp Lenssen]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

If the corporate design guidelines are more "necessary" than the
ability to reliably read the content, don't you think there's
something wrong?
I can read Cyrillic/ Russan with my Arial font.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You give the impression that you haven't been following the
discussion.

If I give the impression I find the character encoding and font issues
to complicated, than that's true. I wonder just why is it so
complicated and if no one ever tried to fix the situation. I guess it's
a Windows/ Redmond problem then.

Another problem may be that the W3C is not pushing font-download
standards so that you can ship your company font with the web site. I
don't say that makes great sense in the context of the Web, but it
makes more sense than rendering a font as image or Flash just so that
you can assume the visitor can see it. (By the way, I tried the MS
proprietary font-download thing, and it is really not so great.)

I can well believe that they would, but I still can't understand why a
company would want to associate itself with a lowest-common font from
a lowest-common supplier

We have font XYZ which is specifically for our company, and we use it
in all headlines -- which then are GIF images. We have font Arial as
main font for the rest of the text, because we don't want to render an
image of the whole page. (Though sometimes I wonder why we not just do
that too...)

E.g. we are also using Flash, which is a similar trade-off; maybe
95% may see the animations, and 5% or so are lost.

Why so? Haven't "we" heard about graceful fallback?

Have you ever seen a complex Flash site, and all the work that goes to
it? There is simply not enough money for most companies to invest in
additional time to implement a graceful fallback for 5% of users. The
fallback is naturally always there -- e.g. an address. Good enough for
just plain information seekers...

--
Google Blogoscoped
http://blog.outer-court.com

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Have you ever seen a complex Flash site, and all the work that goes to
it? There is simply not enough money for most companies to invest in
additional time to implement a graceful fallback for 5% of users.
As in "we've spent a considerable amount of effort and money to make
our site inaccessible - how dare you ask us to even think about
correcting that fault", hmmm?
The fallback is naturally always there

"Naturally"?

[Philipp Lenssen]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Have you ever seen a complex Flash site, and all the work that goes
to it? There is simply not enough money for most companies to
invest in additional time to implement a graceful fallback for 5%
of users.

As in "we've spent a considerable amount of effort and money to make
our site inaccessible - how dare you ask us to even think about
correcting that fault", hmmm?

Flash is not inaccessible to the majority of users.

The fallback is naturally always there

"Naturally"?

Naturally if you have someone in the team who knows about
accessibility. OK, it would also be easy to forget to include the basic
facts as plain HTML text.

--
Google Blogoscoped
http://blog.outer-court.com

[Andreas Prilop]

On 11 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

If I give the impression I find the character encoding and font issues
to complicated, than that's true. I wonder just why is it so
complicated and if no one ever tried to fix the situation.
You may want to read <http://www.dodabo.de/charset/> in German.
Have you ever seen a complex Flash site, and all the work that goes to
it? There is simply not enough money for most companies to invest in
additional time to implement a graceful fallback for 5% of users.

Have you ever tried to use such an argument in the United States?
You might as well write onto your pages "Niggers keep off!" :-(

--
Top-posting.
What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

[Philipp Lenssen]

Andreas Prilop wrote:

On 11 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

If I give the impression I find the character encoding and font
issues to complicated, than that's true. I wonder just why is it so
complicated and if no one ever tried to fix the situation.

You may want to read <http://www.dodabo.de/charset/> in German.

Have you ever seen a complex Flash site, and all the work that goes
to it? There is simply not enough money for most companies to
invest in additional time to implement a graceful fallback for 5%
of users.

Have you ever tried to use such an argument in the United States?
You might as well write onto your pages "Niggers keep off!" :-(

I find that comparison a little drastic. It's everyone's right to serve
or not serve users without Flash. We are not talking about a government
web site, but a private web site. On my web site I have an application
which works in SVG only and there is not even a fallback. So now you
are calling me to be along the same lines of a racist? Sorry, but get
real, and please see the world as more than black and white.

--
Google Blogoscoped
http://blog.outer-court.com

[Neal]

On 11 Jun 2004 09:09:23 GMT, Philipp Lenssen <in**@outer-court.com> wrote:

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, Philipp Lenssen wrote:

> Have you ever seen a complex Flash site, and all the work that goes
> to it? There is simply not enough money for most companies to
> invest in additional time to implement a graceful fallback for 5%
> of users.

As in "we've spent a considerable amount of effort and money to make
our site inaccessible - how dare you ask us to even think about
correcting that fault", hmmm?

Flash is not inaccessible to the majority of users.

It is slow, cranky, and requires good vision. So unless the majority of
users have relatively new machines, cable connections and 20/20 vision,
you're quite mistaken.

Let's just add that one of the users who will find your site inaccessible
is Google.

> The fallback is naturally always there

"Naturally"?

Naturally if you have someone in the team who knows about
accessibility. OK, it would also be easy to forget to include the basic
facts as plain HTML text.

If that's so easy to forget, I'd argue the team has as much business
putting up a website as a team who can't add or subtract has doing the
books.

[Andy Dingley]

Neal <ne*****@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<op**************@news.individual.net>...

On 8 Jun 2004 10:11:44 GMT, Philipp Lenssen <in**@outer-court.com> wrote:

But what if our customer's corporate design guidelines make Arial
necessary?

Then perhaps company policy is out of step with the technical realities of
the media?

Isn't that the normal state of affairs ?
Every web-spod should have to go and work for a paper-based publishing
company at some time (but not for too long, or you go crazy). It's an
eye-opening experience. But then you could say the same for Alex's
experiences in A Clockwork Orange.

[Philipp Lenssen]

Neal <ne*****@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<op**************@news.individual.net>...

On 11 Jun 2004 09:09:23 GMT, Philipp Lenssen <in**@outer-court.com> wrote:

Flash is not inaccessible to the majority of users.

It is slow, cranky, and requires good vision. So unless the majority of
users have relatively new machines, cable connections and 20/20 vision,
you're quite mistaken.

Flash can be quite fast. If you are talking about badly written Flash,
well, that might be slow -- just as badly written HTML tends to be
slow. I can also show you great misuses of HTML and CSS which are very
inaccessible.

Let's just add that one of the users who will find your site inaccessible
is Google.

Actually, Google indexes the text content of Flash files.

I'm not a big Flash fan for reasons of accessibility/ usability and
would not put Flash on any critical part of my site, but you know,
there are companies who like to use it. And if you would tell your
customer who demands flashy animations that Flash is slow, cranky, and
requires good vision, he will probably laugh at you because he knows a
bit about Flash too. You are of course right to point out the problems
with Flash, but if the customer still wants it...

[Shawn K. Quinn]

Philipp Lenssen wrote:

I'm not a big Flash fan for reasons of accessibility/ usability and
would not put Flash on any critical part of my site, but you know,
there are companies who like to use it.
I have no problem with companies using Flash, as long as there is a
non-Flash alternative (there is no Flash plug-in native to my OS).
And if you would tell your customer who demands flashy animations that
Flash is slow, cranky, and requires good vision, he will probably laugh at
you because he knows a bit about Flash too. You are of course right to
point out the problems with Flash, but if the customer still wants it...

In my case, I would tell them that Flash movies are outside my realm of
knowledge, and warn them as well that a Flash movie is a Flash movie, not a
Web site.

--
Shawn K. Quinn