Commonly used fonts for multiscript CSS

[1] Does anyone know of a list of Unicode fonts that support specific
scripts **and that one might expect users reading those scripts to have
on their systems**?  This would need to be by platform, eg. Windows,
Linux, Unix, etc.

The application for this is to get some ideas on how best to define
font-family settings in CSS for a particular script so that you maximise
the likelihood of people seeing the text in the script you choose,
rather than defaulting to arial, helvetica, sans-serif or some such.

(I assume there'll usually be some guesswork involved - although on the
other hand, there are probably some fairly safe bets too, eg. Mangal is
likely to be a safe bet for Devanagari for most Windows XP users.)

[2] Wrt generic fallbacks, one possibility on Windows would be Arial
Unicode MS, although not everyone will have that font.  Are there other
such generic fallbacks on other plaforms?

RI

============
Richard Ishida
W3C

tel: +44 1753 480 292
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/

Received on Monday, 14 April 2003 14:15:26 UTC