>My point is that it would be great if browsers supported all languages, no
>matter how complicated the language is. Still, even with languages that does
>not require shaping, you have problems. For example, a typical Western
>Mac/Win/Unix user may not have a Georgian/Chinese/(insert your favorite
>language here) font on his machine. This is a problem that is solved with
>CSS 2. Still, there is not any wide spread support for web fonts in modern
>browsers. I wonder why?
Most people have fonts to display their own language - they came with their
operating system. I'm a Unicode geek, and it doesn't really matter if I can't
see whether it displays correctly or not. My friends couldn't care less.
>The link below will take you to a web page that shows 500 Japanese
>characters (courtesy of Morisawa Co Ltd) and a fairly large point size
>(18px).
And I can't change the point size, which sucks. I can install a language
pack, which will let me change the point size, and work for all pages,
whether or not they share the font resources.
>This scales up very well as well, because pages may share font resources. A
>font with 2000 characters would be 80kb in this case, and would perhaps work
>for hundres of pages.
And would fail the instant someone added a new character.
>Also, what is it with people and the lack of interest in using fonts. Do
>people actually think that you only need one font, possibly in bold, italic
>and regular style? Do they think that other languages, e.g. Chinese, do not
>use styles? Text should be beautiful to look at too!
But text should be readable first. Typographers will probably flame me for
this, but for English, there's only two or three distinct readable fonts (with
a thousand minor variations on the form.) I'd usually prefer to see my serif
font, instead of some bitmap font someone else chose, as mine will be scalable
and anti-aliased. Pictures work better than fonts for fancy titles, and are
already used for that.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 02 2002 - 19:57:43 EDT