FONT FACE considered harmful

[Andreas Prilop]

Here is an illustration of the warning
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...onts.html#dont
that you should not specify a typeface when you have characters
outside West European Latin-1 on your page.

The reference test page is
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nht...emp/arial.html

This http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nht...face-arial.gif
is the horrible result in Mozilla 1.3 on Mac OS 9.1 when I do
"allow documents to use other fonts". You can see that some
[non-Latin-1] characters are displayed in Chicago instead of Arial.

This http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nht...ce-default.gif
is the result when I disallow to use other fonts, i.e. using the
browsers default typeface (here: Palatino).

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Andreas Prilop wrote:

This http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nht...face-arial.gif
is the horrible result in Mozilla 1.3 on Mac OS 9.1 when I do
"allow documents to use other fonts". You can see that some
[non-Latin-1] characters are displayed in Chicago instead of Arial.

This is probably because your Arial font doesn't contain the
necessary glyphs. So Mozilla plays smart and at least shows the
right character for you. I see nothing unusual, nothing wrong... ?

The default font an user has chosen doesn't necessary contain glyphs
for all the Unicode characters (a HTML4 document use). So even if an
author doesn't specify a font face there may appear characters
rendered with different font from the default the user has chosen.

This is related to a user question who tried to display the greek
omega letter like this:

<FONT face="Symbol">W</FONT>

But why in the world one would want to display the 'W' letter like
the greek omega letter... only just because the "Symbol" font
doesn't contain 'W' glyph.

--
Stanimir

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

Andreas Prilop wrote:

This http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nht...face-arial.gif
is the horrible result in Mozilla 1.3 on Mac OS 9.1 when I do
"allow documents to use other fonts". You can see that some
[non-Latin-1] characters are displayed in Chicago instead of Arial.
This is probably because your Arial font doesn't contain the
necessary glyphs.

That _is_ Andreas's point, after all (but it could be worse: in some
situations, WinIE would just play dumb and present placeholder glyphs,
instead of looking for some other font).
So Mozilla plays smart and at least shows the right character for
you.
Indeed; but it's not a pretty sight.
I see nothing unusual, nothing wrong... ?
As Andreas rightly says, it's cosmetically a mess.
The default font an user has chosen doesn't necessary contain glyphs
for all the Unicode characters (a HTML4 document use). So even if an
author doesn't specify a font face there may appear characters
rendered with different font from the default the user has chosen.
If they take some minimal interest in what they're doing, one might
expect them to be using a font available on their platform which
covers the language script(s) which they're accustomed to reading.

They're in a better position to know what those fonts are than some
arbitrary author who might not be familiar with their platform at all.
This is related to a user question who tried to display the greek
omega letter like this:

<FONT face="Symbol">W</FONT>

We've been here before, many times. But it's a fundamentally
different point from the one which Andreas was making.

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

We've been here before, many times. But it's a fundamentally
different point from the one which Andreas was making.

O.k. Seems I haven't got it, sorry - probably it is because of my
bad english.

But anyway, I don't think specifying font family is such fundamental
evil (if I got it right this time).

--
Stanimir

[Bertilo Wennergren]

Stanimir Stamenkov:

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

We've been here before, many times. But it's a fundamentally
different point from the one which Andreas was making.

O.k. Seems I haven't got it, sorry - probably it is because of my bad
english. But anyway, I don't think specifying font family is such fundamental
evil (if I got it right this time).

Not a fundamental evil, perhaps, but it's still not advisable.

Most of the time people specify fonts hoping that it might make the page
_look better_. But if the character repertoire is wide the actual result
could be that the page looks just as ugly as Andreas showed us (or
worse). So if your striving for nice looks, you'd better not specify any
fonts in such cases.

And as Alan pointed out, the actual result can be even worse, in some
brain-dead browsers, where some characters actually might not be
displayed at all, although they could have been, if the author had taken
the good advice.

--
Bertilo Wennergren <be******@gmx.net> <http://www.bertilow.com>

[Andreas Prilop]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

But anyway, I don't think specifying font family is such fundamental
evil (if I got it right this time).

Maybe it's not evil - but what's the point in specifying a typeface
(which is always for cosmetic reasons) when the results can be so
horrible? Is there any advantage at all for the others, i.e. those
readers who get _all_ letters in Arial, with the specification
"font-family: Arial, sans-serif"?

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Andreas Prilop wrote:

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

But anyway, I don't think specifying font family is such fundamental
evil (if I got it right this time).
Maybe it's not evil - but what's the point in specifying a typeface
(which is always for cosmetic reasons) when the results can be so
horrible?

The reason for specifying things for just cosmetic reasons is just
that - the cosmetic reasons (author intentions and aesthetic look).
If it wasn't the case there wouldn't be CSS, IMHO.

If a specific design is good or bad - it's another (very relative)
issue.
Is there any advantage at all for the others, i.e. those
readers who get _all_ letters in Arial, with the specification
"font-family: Arial, sans-serif"?

My default font is Arial. Generally I don't like specifying custom
fonts not because it alters the type face so much but it alters the
preffered font size. (which in generall is a function of the
corresponding font face 'font-size-adjust' and how narrow the font
face is).

--
Stanimir

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

This is related to a user question who tried to display the greek
omega letter like this:

<FONT face="Symbol">W</FONT>
Alan J. Flavell wrote:

We've been here before, many times. But it's a fundamentally
different point from the one which Andreas was making.

O.k. Seems I haven't got it, sorry - probably it is because of my
bad english.

The issue which is being discussed above is the fact that the "W"
character in HTML is the "W" character, and nothing else; the Omega
character is a totally different character, at a different character
code position, and is in no way a cosmetic variant of the "W"
character. (The example that I use in my web page[1] on the topic is
"q" versus "theta", but the principle is the same.)

It's certainly an important principle, and one on which I think you
would agree with me (and I know that Andreas would). But the point in
that case is that the (misguided) author of the above markup is trying
to fool the browser into using a font whose character arrangement
differs fundamentally from the normal one.
But anyway, I don't think specifying font family is such fundamental
evil (if I got it right this time).

Well, the font face = symbol/dingbats/webdings etc. thing in HTML, and
its counterpart in CSS, surely _can_ be categorised as "evil"; but it
wasn't the issue that Andreas had raised on this thread.

Andreas, on this thread, was talking about cosmetics. The author has
presumably wanted to specify a font with the intention of *improving*
the cosmetic appearance, but has succeeded in making it much, much,
worse.

all the best

[1] http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...e-harmful.html

But be sure to read the classic
http://babel.alis.com:8080/web_ml/html/fontface.html

[Andreas Prilop]

Stanimir Stamenkov <s7****@netscape.net> wrote:

X-Accept-Language: bg, en-us

I noticed that you have Bulgarian as first language. Here is
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nht...netscape48.gif
how Netscape 4.80 displays my test page
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/cyrillic.win
*when I add* style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif" to the source
text. Well, you may call Netscape 4 broken in the first place.
Nevertheless, I think it's also the author's fault to specify
"Arial" for non-Latin-1 text.

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

It's certainly an important principle, and one on which I think you
would agree with me (and I know that Andreas would).
Yes, I agree with you on all points.

Andreas, on this thread, was talking about cosmetics. The author has
presumably wanted to specify a font with the intention of *improving*
the cosmetic appearance, but has succeeded in making it much, much,
worse.
For this and many other cases the HTML spec
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/styles.html#h-14.3.1> states:
User agents should also allow users to disable the author's style
sheets entirely, in which case the user agent must not apply any
persistent or alternate style sheets.

--
Stanimir

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Andreas Prilop wrote:

I noticed that you have Bulgarian as first language. Here is
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nht...netscape48.gif
how Netscape 4.80 displays my test page
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/cyrillic.win
*when I add* style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif" to the source
text. Well, you may call Netscape 4 broken in the first place.
Nevertheless, I think it's also the author's fault to specify
"Arial" for non-Latin-1 text.

Here's what I see with my Netscape 4.8:

http://www.geocities.com/stanio/temp/netscape48.png

The default font which I use is Arial. The same I see in all other
browsers on my system (IE6, Opera7, Mozilla/Netscape7).

--
Stanimir

[Andreas Prilop]

Stanimir Stamenkov <s7****@netscape.net> wrote:

http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/cyrillic.win
*when I add* style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif" to the source ^^^^^^^^^^^^ text.
Here's what I see with my Netscape 4.8:
http://www.geocities.com/stanio/temp/netscape48.png

That's my original version with URL above. I had a *local* version
on my harddisk where I *added* "font-family: Arial" .
The default font which I use is Arial. The same I see in all other
browsers on my system (IE6, Opera7, Mozilla/Netscape7).

There is no such problem on MS Windows because (since Windows 95)
the typeface Arial contains Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, etc. characters.
There is no longer "Arial Cyr", "Arial Greek", "Arial Baltic" as
in Windows 3.1. But the situation is different on Macintosh, Linux,
Unices, where we have different fonts for different character sets.
Those operating systems would typically have "Helvetica CE" instead
of Arial for MS Windows.

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Andreas Prilop wrote:

Stanimir Stamenkov <s7****@netscape.net> wrote:

http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/cyrillic.win
*when I add* style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif" to the source ^^^^^^^^^^^^ text.

I don't have to add this just because as I point later I use Arial
as default.
Here's what I see with my Netscape 4.8:
http://www.geocities.com/stanio/temp/netscape48.png

That's my original version with URL above. I had a *local* version
on my harddisk where I *added* "font-family: Arial" .

So I use Arial as default.

The default font which I use is Arial. The same I see in all other
browsers on my system (IE6, Opera7, Mozilla/Netscape7).

There is no such problem on MS Windows because (since Windows 95)
the typeface Arial contains Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, etc. characters.
There is no longer "Arial Cyr", "Arial Greek", "Arial Baltic" as
in Windows 3.1. But the situation is different on Macintosh, Linux,
Unices, where we have different fonts for different character sets.
Those operating systems would typically have "Helvetica CE" instead
of Arial for MS Windows.

O.k. I agree - it is not best practice to alter the font family...
but as every other design issue everything is relative to the author
intentions and the audience it is aimed at.

BTW, other OSes could have OpenType fonts too.

--
Stanimir

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

Here's what I see with my Netscape 4.8:

Thus demonstrating, again, another important point from this whole
complex: the _name_ of a font does not, in and of itself, say anything
about the _repertoire_ of characters which could be found in it.

In this particular context, we are seeing a difference between
operating systems. But even on the same OS (take e.g Win9x) there
have been big differences in character repertoire between the
different versions of the Arial font coming from MS to their various
customer groups. As some US contributors here, in particular, have
testified (they were given font files that were around 100K in size,
rather than the ~300K ones that European customers got: I don't know
the exact character repertoire that was in the US-domestic fonts, but
clearly quite emasculated compared with the European version).
So I use Arial as default.
You use, as your default, _some_ font that is called Arial. But this
doesn't really tell us a great deal about its character repertoire,
without additional information.
O.k. I agree - it is not best practice to alter the font family...
but as every other design issue everything is relative to the author
intentions and the audience it is aimed at.
But unless an author is aware of the implications of their choice,
they cannot really have well-informed "intentions" in a WWW context.
Andreas is trying to provide information on the implications, so that
authors can understand the consequences of their choice.
BTW, other OSes could have OpenType fonts too.

That seems to be yet another variable in the mix.

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

But unless an author is aware of the implications of their choice,
they cannot really have well-informed "intentions" in a WWW context.
Andreas is trying to provide information on the implications, so that
authors can understand the consequences of their choice.

O.k. I've agreed, I'm not arguing any more. :-)

So authors should include more alternate styles with their
documents. An alternate style with just minor difference where it
doesn't change the default font at least for the main content would
be fine "workaround".

I'll make an off-topic note here: The same goes for specifying
colors - pure white background just burn my eyes on a CRT display
(which most readers use, I suppose), for example.

And like I've noted in another message: if everything is just
terrible for the reader, UAs should propose a mechanism to switch
all author styles all together, which is responsibility of the UAs
of course.

--
Stanimir

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

And like I've noted in another message: if everything is just
terrible for the reader, UAs should propose a mechanism to switch
all author styles all together, which is responsibility of the UAs
of course.

Sure. I think you're kicking-down an open door on that point, though:
it's been several years since I noticed anyone around here trying to
prohibit users from having preferences.[1]

cheers

[1] One nutter did once claim that it was a breach of the artist's
copyright under German law for the user to try to interfere with the
styles that had been set by the author. He got pretty comprehensively
howled down, though.

[William Tasso]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

...
[1] One nutter did once claim that it was a breach of the artist's
copyright under German law for the user to try to interfere with the
styles that had been set by the author.
he hee - I must've missed that. what a carry-on ;o)
He got pretty comprehensively
howled down, though.

really?

--
William Tasso - http://WilliamTasso.com

[Eric Jarvis]

Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

But unless an author is aware of the implications of their choice,
they cannot really have well-informed "intentions" in a WWW context.
Andreas is trying to provide information on the implications, so that
authors can understand the consequences of their choice.

O.k. I've agreed, I'm not arguing any more. :-)

So authors should include more alternate styles with their
documents. An alternate style with just minor difference where it
doesn't change the default font at least for the main content would
be fine "workaround".

and authors should learn the glyphs available on any font they specify
(across a range of platforms) before specifying a font on ANY situation
where they may move beyond basic alphanumeric Latin characters

when encountering any problem with that then they MUST find a sensible
solution rather than slap together a kludge that works on their own set up

same as most issues here, it's about learning the specifications,
understanding the tools, and not assuming that what works on one set up
will work on them all

--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
all these years I've waited for the revolution
and all we end up getting is spin

[Bertilo Wennergren]

Eric Jarvis:

and authors should learn the glyphs available on any font they specify
(across a range of platforms) before specifying a font on ANY situation
where they may move beyond basic alphanumeric Latin characters

That sound awfully similar to "checking in all browsers". It's just not
possible. Fonts and platforms vary too much. There is no telling what
could be the content in font X just by its name.

Latin 1 characters will mostly work everywhere. Anything else is risky.

--
Bertilo Wennergren <be******@gmx.net> <http://www.bertilow.com>

[Andreas Prilop]

Bertilo Wennergren <be******@gmx.net> wrote:

Latin 1 characters will mostly work everywhere.

Not even that:
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...o8859-mac.html
Even the latest version 2.9.5 of iCab for Mac OS 9 fails on
Icelandic letters, currency sign, superscripts.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

This is probably because your Arial font doesn't contain the
necessary glyphs.

That _is_ Andreas's point, after all

Arial is special in the sense that (as you remark elsewhere in this
thread) it exists in different implementations with different glyph
repertoires. So if an author checks that his system shows all the
characters he needs when Arial is used, he cannot be sure of having
them displayed in other browsing situations. (Besides, such checking is
a bit difficult since browsers may - and indeed should - pick up glyphs
from other fonts when needed.)

But I don't think the point applies to situations where a document
needs a rich character repertoire and the author knows that a specific
font, which hardly exists in different variants, has the characters
needed. So if I specify e.g. font-family: "Arial Unicode MS" for such
reasons, then this will help in quite a many browsing situations (since
users probably don't have that font as the default font but some less
rich font), and it should do no harm when Arial Unicode MS is not
available in the user's system. The possible drawback is that this font
will be used, when available, even when the user's system has a better
rich font installed and set up as the default font. But the risk is
small, both by potential damage and by probability.

For example, if use use phonetic characters of the IPA block, I would
say that using
font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "Lucida Sans Unicode";
for elements containing IPA strings will considerably improve the odds
of correct rendering.

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

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Bertilo Wennergren wrote:

That sound awfully similar to "checking in all browsers". It's just not
possible. Fonts and platforms vary too much.
That's right, unfortunately.
There is no telling what
could be the content in font X just by its name.
I'm glad it's not only me who's trying to stress this point.
Latin 1 characters will mostly work everywhere.
Are you sure this is true? I have a recollection of being told
that older Chinese (or was it Japanese?) browsers may have problems
with the upper half of iso-8859-1
Anything else is risky.

Indeed: but if you're addressing the users of a particular writing
script, then I'd say one of two things apply:

- their browser is set up to handle that script OK at least
with their default font, -or-

- yours isn't the only site that they get problems with

The real killer IMHO is trying to display writing scripts which are
foreign to the reader (or to the reader's locale). Whereby I suppose
one has to assume that mathematical/scientific notations have to be
treated as foreign to _every_ non-specialist locale/browser/reader.

[Eric Jarvis]

Bertilo Wennergren wrote:

Eric Jarvis:

and authors should learn the glyphs available on any font they specify
(across a range of platforms) before specifying a font on ANY situation
where they may move beyond basic alphanumeric Latin characters
That sound awfully similar to "checking in all browsers". It's just not
possible. Fonts and platforms vary too much. There is no telling what
could be the content in font X just by its name.

I didn't say *all*, I said "across a range"...working to published
standards is simply the first part of the process (though by far the most
important)...you need to know where that will fail through others ignoring
the standards

if almost all unicode fonts fail to provide a legible foo character in
Borogravian Runic script then you need to know that before creating a site
for the Borogravian Elderberry Wine Manufacturers Association (the
foo bar foo foo)...sadly you can't simply assume that a standards
compliant site will work in all circumstances

moving beyond the basics is best done after a bit of homework rather than
by trial and error

and you are right, there IS no telling what is in a font simply by it's
name
Latin 1 characters will mostly work everywhere. Anything else is risky.

but frequently necessary

--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
all these years I've waited for the revolution
and all we end up getting is spin

[Paul Gorodyansky]

Hi,
Andreas Prilop <nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote in message news:<071020032042412171%nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>...

Stanimir Stamenkov <s7****@netscape.net> wrote:

http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/cyrillic.win
*when I add* style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif" to the source ^^^^^^^^^^^^ text.
Here's what I see with my Netscape 4.8:
http://www.geocities.com/stanio/temp/netscape48.png

That's my original version with URL above. I had a *local* version
on my harddisk where I *added* "font-family: Arial" .

The default font which I use is Arial. The same I see in all other
browsers on my system (IE6, Opera7, Mozilla/Netscape7).

There is no such problem on MS Windows because (since Windows 95)
the typeface Arial contains Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, etc. characters.

No, it's not correct - Windows does have such problem.
When - long ago - I wrote my own - for Cyrillic -
"Font Face is harmful" page
( http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PaulGor/ff.htm )
I used Arial as a BEST example.

It's because original (non-localized to say Russian) Windows 95/98/ME
do have Arial and Times New Roman *but* they do NOT contain Cyrillic!
(It's not the case in Windows NT/2000/XP).

Only after a user finds CD-ROM and installs
"MS Multillanguage Support for Windows 95/98/ME", only then
Arial and Times New Roman will handle Cyrillic.
In say Wordpad a user could see just "Arial (Western)" before
installing "MS Multillanguage Support" and after -
"Arial (Cyrillic)", etc:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...lGor/cyr9x.htm

There is no longer "Arial Cyr", "Arial Greek", "Arial Baltic" as
in Windows 3.1.

Yes, there are no separate .ttf for them, but Windows still
shows 'virtual' fonts such as "Arial(Cyrillic)" and
"Arial (Western)" - just partial views of one large multilingual
Arial.ttf.
--
Regards,
Paul Gorodyansky
"Cyrillic (Russian): instructions for Windows and Internet":
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PaulGor/

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Andreas Prilop wrote:

Bertilo Wennergren <be******@gmx.net> wrote:

Latin 1 characters will mostly work everywhere.
Not even that:
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...o8859-mac.html

Oh yes, that too. :-{
Even the latest version 2.9.5 of iCab for Mac OS 9 fails on
Icelandic letters, currency sign, superscripts.

I'm allowed a big sigh, aren't I?

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Paul Gorodyansky wrote:

It's because original (non-localized to say Russian) Windows 95/98/ME
do have Arial and Times New Roman *but* they do NOT contain Cyrillic!
(It's not the case in Windows NT/2000/XP).

Only after a user finds CD-ROM and installs
"MS Multillanguage Support for Windows 95/98/ME", only then
Arial and Times New Roman will handle Cyrillic.
In say Wordpad a user could see just "Arial (Western)" before
installing "MS Multillanguage Support" and after -
"Arial (Cyrillic)", etc:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...lGor/cyr9x.htm

In fact every Windows version has Cyrillic support, even the U.S.
versions. The problem, as you give pretty good idea, is with
Win95/98/Me. If the "Multilingual Support" is not chosen upon first
install there's no option to install it afterwards - many English
OEM versions come with an automated install procedure which doesn't
ask the user to customize such settings.

There's a bulgarian site <http://injinera.bgplus.com/na4alo.htm>
which describes the problem and gives custom solutions for it, but
it's bulgarian only. :-\

--
Stanimir

[Andreas Prilop]

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

There's a bulgarian site <http://injinera.bgplus.com/na4alo.htm>
which describes the problem and gives custom solutions for it, but
it's bulgarian only. :-\

Sounds like the old joke
"Do you want to learn to read? Then write to ..."

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Andreas Prilop wrote:

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

There's a bulgarian site <http://injinera.bgplus.com/na4alo.htm>
which describes the problem and gives custom solutions for it, but
it's bulgarian only. :-\

Sounds like the old joke
"Do you want to learn to read? Then write to ..."

I don't know if Paul understands Russian but if he does he probably
could get what's written on the site because the Bulgarian and
Russian languages have much in common. For English readers which may
be interested I'm sorry AltaVista's Babel Fish doesn't know Bulgarian.

--
Stanimir

[Eric Jarvis]

Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

Andreas Prilop wrote:

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

There's a bulgarian site <http://injinera.bgplus.com/na4alo.htm>
which describes the problem and gives custom solutions for it, but
it's bulgarian only. :-\

Sounds like the old joke
"Do you want to learn to read? Then write to ..."

I don't know if Paul understands Russian but if he does he probably
could get what's written on the site because the Bulgarian and
Russian languages have much in common. For English readers which may
be interested I'm sorry AltaVista's Babel Fish doesn't know Bulgarian.

<http://www.bultra.com>

<http://webtrance.skycode.com/online.asp>

--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
"live fast, die only if strictly necessary"

[Paul Gorodyansky]

Stanimir Stamenkov <s7****@netscape.net> wrote in message news:<bm************@ID-207379.news.uni-berlin.de>...

Paul Gorodyansky wrote:

It's because original (non-localized to say Russian) Windows 95/98/ME
do have Arial and Times New Roman *but* they do NOT contain Cyrillic!
(It's not the case in Windows NT/2000/XP).

Only after a user finds CD-ROM and installs
"MS Multillanguage Support for Windows 95/98/ME", only then
Arial and Times New Roman will handle Cyrillic.
In say Wordpad a user could see just "Arial (Western)" before
installing "MS Multillanguage Support" and after -
"Arial (Cyrillic)", etc:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...lGor/cyr9x.htm

In fact every Windows version has Cyrillic support, even the U.S.
versions. The problem, as you give pretty good idea, is with
Win95/98/Me. If the "Multilingual Support" is not chosen upon first
install there's no option to install it afterwards - many English
OEM versions come with an automated install procedure which doesn't
ask the user to customize such settings.

There's a bulgarian site <http://injinera.bgplus.com/na4alo.htm>
which describes the problem and gives custom solutions for it, but
it's bulgarian only. :-\

I do know that Bulgarian site and exchanged e-mails with its author.

But you confuse 2 different options:
1) "User-level" support for non-Western encoding/fonts/keyboard
It's what we are talking about here - Arial, etc. -
"MS Multilanguage Support" option in Control Panel.

"User-level" support _can_ be installed after initial
setup of Windows 95/98/ME, no need in 'custom solutions'
and here is my short instruction for such installation:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...lGor/cyr9x.htm

2) "System-level" support for non-Western encoding.
It's for *system* (non-multilingual) fonts (.fon) such
as "MS Sans Serif". It's for such issues as non-Western
file _names_ and non-Western symbols in the _interface_
of say Russian program (menus, dialogs, etc.)
It is _not_ related to our topic, it is System Code Page
issues.

Yes, one cannot change System Code Page in Win 95/98/ME
after initial installation and yes, there are some custom
work-around methods - some listed on that Bulgarian site
you mentioned, other - on my page (English and Russian varaints)
"Full Russification. Russian programs and file names":
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...ulGor/full.htm
--
Regards,
Paul Gorodyansky
"Cyrillic (Russian): instructions for Windows and Internet":
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PaulGor/

[Paul Gorodyansky]

Stanimir Stamenkov <s7****@netscape.net> wrote in message news:<bm************@ID-207379.news.uni-berlin.de>...

Andreas Prilop wrote:

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

There's a bulgarian site <http://injinera.bgplus.com/na4alo.htm>
which describes the problem and gives custom solutions for it, but
it's bulgarian only. :-\

Sounds like the old joke
"Do you want to learn to read? Then write to ..."

I don't know if Paul understands Russian but if he does he probably
could get what's written on the site because the Bulgarian and
Russian languages have much in common.

1) Russian is my native language. I can understand _some_ of Bulgarian,
but not the details, so I had to ask the author of that site to
expalin to me some things whne he first wrote to me offering to
look at his site.

2) In any case, what that site offers is quicker way than
some methods offered on my 'Full Russification' page, BUT:
- his methods are only for people who know computers and
Windows OS pretty good
- the package offered on my "Full Russification" section
*does the same thing* (it's made by K.Kazarnovsky
in Russia, allows dynamic change of System Code Page
between Western, Cyrillic, and Hebrew), but can be used
by almost any user, because it does not require a deep
knowledge of the OS, Registry et al

My page is available in both Russian and English - all
sections on my site have 2 variants - Russian and English

--
Regards,
Paul Gorodyansky
"Cyrillic (Russian): instructions for Windows and Internet":
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PaulGor/

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Paul Gorodyansky wrote:

1) "User-level" support for non-Western encoding/fonts/keyboard
It's what we are talking about here - Arial, etc. -
"MS Multilanguage Support" option in Control Panel.

O.k. May I've put the issue in a wrong direction, sorry.

--
Stanimir

[Henri Sivonen]

In article <07*************************@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>,
Andreas Prilop <nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote:

Those operating systems would typically have "Helvetica CE" instead
of Arial for MS Windows.

But as of Mac OS X 10.2 Helvetica CE was combined with Helvetica. OTOH,
if a Windows user has a font called "Helvetica", chances are it is a
Type 1 font that does not contain all the CE chars.

--
Henri Sivonen
hs******@iki.fi
http://www.iki.fi/hsivonen/
Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html