font stuff .. very very very rough draft

A very rough draft.

Sorry for the tardiness.

Andrew




3.2 Dealing with undisplayable characters



1. If you need to specify a font, choose fonts common to your target
audience.



2. When I look at my page I see square boxes instead of letters.

Most fonts contain a small subset of all possible characters. Within
each font there is a symbol used to indicate that the codepoint
representing a partucular character that is being displayed is not
present in the font. Commonly, the missing character is represented by a
square or rectangle.

Change your style sheet, and use a different font.

If square boxes display instead of the appropriate character, the font
being used to display the page does not have the necessary characters in
the font.

3. When I look at my page, the page appears to be a mix of random
characters.

It is possible that the web browser is attempting to display your web
page using the wrong character encoding. Please check that you have
specified the character encoding correctly within your webpage. In
addition check to see if your web server is specifying a character
encoding in the http header. Tools like web-sniffer
[http://webtools.mozilla.org/web-sniffer/] allow you to view the http
header and web page being served by your web server.

4. The language my web page is written in requires special fonts or
software to view.

Most common and widely used languages are supported by either the
operating system or the web browser. Some languages are more uncommon on
the web and may require very specific fonts, web browsers or font
rendering technologies.

If you are creating a web page in a language that has specific technical
constraints, then it is advisable to provide information or links to the
required fonts or software or alternatively, provide information on
viewing the page.

Received on Wednesday, 11 June 2003 15:07:27 UTC