From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Thu Oct 30 2003 - 23:51:26 CST
Bhavin Sanghani <bforbhavin at hotmail dot com> wrote:
> I m giving entity in my xml file with these decimal values (e.g.
> &#862) and i convert it to html by applying css and xsl files.
> Now if proper unicode font is selected then it shows proper chars
> otherwise it shows question mark.
>
> So, following are some queries:
>
> - Without installing font on machine or putting image instead of
> these chars ..is there any other solution...??
> - What min. specifcation i have to made for diff. browsers(IE and
> Netscape) and diff. OS(Windows, MAC,Linux)....
You can use CSS (or, worse, the HTML "font face" tag) to specify a
particular font or set of fonts that you know have glyphs for the
characters in question. For example, in one of my pages I give an IPA
pronunciation, and to try to make sure the user could read the IPA
characters I included the following line:
<font face="Lucida Sans Unicode, Verdana Ref, Arial Unicode MS, Gentium,
Code2000">/juˈwelɪk/</font>
Now, I know "font face" is kludgy and deprecated, and I'll fix it one
day, but the point is that you can suggest certain fonts in your
document that will display your text properly. The hope is that the
reader might have at least one of these fonts, although there is no way
to ensure that. There are some tools (at least for Windows) that will
display the glyph repertoire of a given font, so you can find out which
ones to include in your own list.
Just as a matter of personal preference, I would stick with standard
(X)HTML and CSS and avoid using non-standard technologies like so-called
"dynamic fonts." I think you can reach more potential users this way.
Of course, you should also check
http://www.unicode.org/help/display_problems.html for more information.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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