FAQ suggestions

Hi!


A common problem is seeing characters displayed incorrectly when viewing
a web page in a different encoding that what one normall uses.  Usually,
this is due to fonts on the rendering system not being available.  The
usual answer is "install the fonts".  Although information on how to
install the fonts as well as where to get them is relatively easy to
come by, the most important question is surprisingly elusive: which
fonts do I need to install to be able to see the same sizes and
strengths of fonts for "unusual" encodings as I do for more familiar
encodings?

Here is a concrete example.  I didn't see all Cyrillic fonts in my
browser, just the ones which are in the Russian alphabet.  I found some
unicode fonts on the web and installed them.  I now see the missing
letters.  However, on some (but not all) web pages, they are too small
and/or too thin compared to other letters.  Important note: these are
not pages which explicitly specify fonts etc, just tags such as <H1>,
<STRONG> or whatever.  Obviously, the required fonts are missing or
otherwise unavailable and the ones I have are being substituted.

To answer my question, I need to know how the information in an HTML
page is transformed into a request for specific fonts, which might or
might not be available to me.  Surprisingly, this doesn't seem to be
documented anywhere.

All I want is for a simple HTML page to have the same look and feel,
regardless of what characters it uses.

Received on Thursday, 26 February 2004 09:40:19 UTC