Google Chrome and LC diacritic display

[Bob Rasmussen]

See notes below.

On Wed, 20 Jun 2012, Galen Charlton wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 9:23 PM, Alan Boyd <alan.boyd at oberlin.edu> wrote:
> > I'm up to date on Chrome, but have to admit I'm still on Windows XP... that
> > might be an issue?
> 
> After some searching, I suspect it might indeed be a Chrome bug [1],
> [2] specific to Windows XP.  It also sounds like changing the default
> font that Chrome uses to Lucinda Sans Unicode might help.

Slight correction if I may, it's Lucida, not Lucinda.

> 
> [1] http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106338

The answer given is mostly inaccurate.

> [2] http://www.webmasterworld.com/html/4102775.htm

I didn't follow it all, but what I saw was also inaccurate.

Almost all Windows fonts use Unicode. Those with "Unicode" in the name 
tend to have more coverage than others. None that I know of has coverage 
for all of the latest version of Unicode (see www.unicode.org).

This is not a character coding problem. The 0361 is coded correctly. Not 
that it is also possible to code this as its two halves, FE20 and FE21. 
These have more font coverage, although both approaches are sanctioned in 
MARC.

Further to my previous post, I looked at XP, and installed the latest 
Chrome there. It shows boxes where it should show diacritics. Further 
analysis reveals that:

1) Chrome on XP (mine, at least) is displaying the sample in Arial. I 
don't know if this is configurable.

2) Charmap on XP reveals that 0361 is missing from Arial, Times New Roman, 
and Calibri.

3) A search for this character on my XP box (Anzio, our terminal 
emulator, does this) found the character in the font "DejaVu Sans Mono" at 
least.

Finally, note that even when this diacritic is displayed, it may not be 
positioned right horizontally. 

This issue may not be reasonably resolvable on XP. But then I haven't 
looked at website-served embedded fonts for a while...

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
 company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com
          voice: (US) 503-624-0360 (9:00-6:00 Pacific Time)
            fax: (US) 503-624-0760
            web: http://www.anzio.com
 street address: Rasmussen Software, Inc.
                 10240 SW Nimbus, Suite L9
                 Portland, OR  97223  USA

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2012-06-20