On Tuesday, April 30, 2002, at 01:35 PM, Tom Gewecke wrote:
>> Russian characters have an extra spacing on Mac in both browsers (no
>> problem on pc).
>> T h e c h a r a c t e r s l o o k l I k e t h I s there is no
>> actual space between them. I have been testing on OS X using IE 5.1 and
>> NS 6.2. This page has the same issue
>> http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/translations/russian.html .
>> I have spent more than 10 hours trying to figure out the problem, this
>> is my last hope.
>
> It's because your browser is using the Japanese Hiragino font, with its
> double-width characters, for Cyrillic. Deactivate or remove this and it
> should look normal. Only a problem for OS X I believe.
That is the problem, but it's more general. Shift JIS contains Cyrillic,
and IE and Netscape on the Mac do not give a way to control the sequence
of fonts used for UTF-8 display. It's getting to Japanese fonts before
Cyrillic fonts. This is not specific to either Hiragino or OS X; it
happens with any Japanese font and both OS 9 and OS X.
One workaround is to specify a Cyrillic font for display of UTF-8 pages,
but that requires the end user to configure their browser. Another
workaround is to remove all Japanese support from the OS, but that is
pretty draconian, and is not supported on OS X (/System/Library/Fonts on
OS X is only modifiable by the superuser).
Deborah Goldsmith
Manager, Fonts
Apple Computer, Inc.
goldsmith@apple.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Apr 30 2002 - 18:55:29 EDT