From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sun Nov 21 2004 - 10:04:37 CST
On 21/11/2004 15:28, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
>
>> On 21/11/2004 00:50, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> <style type="text/css"><!--
>>> .he {
>>> font-family: "SIL Ezra", "Arial Unicode MS", David, Myriam,
>>> Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif;
>>> direction: rtl;
>>> }
>>
>>
>>
>> This will absolutely NOT work because SIL Ezra is legacy encoded and
>> the others are Unicode encoded. You should be using Ezra SIL. See my
>> previous posting.
>
>
> Thanks for this correction. I thought that this font was Unicode too...
Please read my earlier posting. Of course it does make things rather
difficult that none of my postings ever get approved on a Sunday,
especially when I am trying to correct seriously misleading factual errors.
>
> But this creates an even more complicate case for creating a portable
> HTML page: as the font uses a specific encoding, how can characters be
> selected in that font, given that the page will be UTF-8 encoded and
> thus will contain numeric references to Unicode code points?
>
> Does this font works as if it was assigning ISO-8859-1 characters? If
> so, Elaine will need to use only Latin-1, which will be correctly
> rendered as expected only if the specific font is installed. If it is
> not, readers will see Latin-1 characters, but not even any Hebrew
> character present in most classic core fonts of their browser...
If you really want to know, the font SIL Ezra (which was never intended
for Unicode use) uses PUA characters F020 to F0FF only. It is totally
unsuitable for web use because it uses some of these PUA characters as
combining marks, and this usage is not supported (for some reason which
has never been explained) by the world's most popular browser (although
it was supported by previous versions, hence breaking a large number of
existing web pages using legacy encodings for Hebrew, Greek etc with
diacritics). So please don't even think of how to trick browsers into
using SIL Ezra - which would also require support for visual encoding.
>
> So if she really wants to include character compositions which are
> only possible with Ezra SIL, she will need these two classes:
>
> <style type="text/css"><!--
> .he { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", David, Myriam, Tahoma, Arial,
> sans-serif;}
> .heb { font-family: "Ezra SIL" }
> .he, .heb { direction: rtl; }
> //--></style>
>
No problem if you are using Ezra SIL, which is a different font from SIL
Ezra, and is Unicode mapped and so can be mixed with the others you mention.
> ...
> I still doubt that you need such a specialized font for Biblic Hebrew
> and Canaanite languages, to create a technical translation glossary,
> which would probably use modern Hebrew only (so the "he" class above
> would probably be enough...)
David is a very adequate font for Hebrew with consonants and vowel
points, as long as accents are not required - and Elaine is very
unlikely to require them. Times New Roman is fine for unpointed
consonantal Hebrew only as its Holam point is unfortunately broken.
Arial and Arial Unicode MS are probably OK for modern Hebrew but look
odd to those of us more used to the ancient language - and their Holam
is also broken. Miriam doesn't look good at all, to me.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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