[WEB4LIB] Fonts

[Andrew Cunningham]

Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org wrote:
> Here's a question that has nothing to do with any particular institution's
> home page (and I can stand flames...):
> 
> For most material on most Web pages, why specify typeface (font) at all,
> either through CSS or directly?
> 

There are practical reasons, esp when working with Unicode web pages. 
Unicode encodes characters, sometimes these characters can be 
represented by variant glyphs in different languages, making it 
imporatnt to use different fonts for different languages.

Many users do not change the default fonts that their web browser uses. 
If I was creating a web page in certain African languages, with the 
character "Ŋ" (U+014A). I would not wnat to use the Times New Roman 
font, since it uses the wrong glyph variant for many African languages. 
If I was creating a page in the Yolngu-matha languages on the other hand 
, I'd want to use a font that used the Sami variant (ie like Times New 
Roman)

It becomes more problematic with Han Unification, where Chinese, 
Japanese or Korean may use the same codepoint but use glyph variants. 
For intsnace you're prepaing a web page in Japanese, and want to include 
the Chinese names using the Chinese glyphs rather than the Japanese gylphs.

Syriac web pages are even more dependant on fonts. There are three 
scripts (Estrangelo, Serto (West Syriac), and East Syriac), sharing the 
same unicode block. If you need a particular script then it is necessary 
to use an appropriate font.

Simarily, with the Arabic script there are two main style (Naskh and 
Nastaliq). Most unicode fonts are Naskh, but as Nastaliq OpenType fonts 
become available, it will possible to specific an appropraite font for 
an appropraite language. For instance Naskh fonts for Arabic, or 
Nastaliq fonts for Persian, Urdu, etc. Depending on typographic 
preferences for different languages.

There are cases when for different languages, different fonts are 
appropriate.


Andrew

-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Multilingual  Technical Officer
OPT, Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc at vicnet.net.au

Ph: +61-3-8664-7001
Fax: +61-3-9639-2175

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~andrewc/
http://www.openroad.net.au/