Re: Flash of unstyled text/Flash of unfonted content

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 9:51 PM, Patrick Garies <pgaries@fastmail.us> wrote:
> On an aside: It would be nice if there were some font with glyphs for every
> character of which chunks could be downloaded by the browser as needed. That
> would ensure that all characters could at least be displayed (if not
> optimally) as long as the user were online. I suspect that such an endeavor
> would significantly increase use of characters that are avoided for fear of
> a missing glyph.

To do literally what you desire is no longer possible, as there are
almost 100K characters defined in Unicode, and a font conforming to
any of the common standards (e.g. OpenType) can hold no more than 64K
glyphs to represent those characters.

I expect the particular font you were seeing as fallback might be the
Last Resort font, developed by Apple but made available to others:
http://unicode.org/policies/lastresortfont_eula.html
It can at least give an indicator of what codepoint range a missing
character is from....

Regards,

T

-- 
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up
and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."
- Sir Winston Churchill

Received on Thursday, 22 October 2009 05:47:03 UTC