Re: Commonly used fonts for multiscript CSS

I did a little research on this last week, specifically with Japanese.  
I checked out several Japanese web sites and was surprised to find that 
hardly anyone specified a font in the HTML or in the CSS.  It seems 
that unlike in the US where we commonly specify Arial, Helvetica, etc.  
the East Asian markets let the browsers choose the appropriate fonts 
for the script, either using user preferences or defaults.

The reason I did this was a customer wanted to know what fonts to 
specify for some Japanese web pages.  As I recall, the only sites I saw 
the specified fonts were www.microsoft.com/japan (which specified 
Arial!) and www.apple.co.jp which specified a Japanese font with a 
Japanese name that, as far as I know, is specific to the Mac.

Lllloyd

On Monday, April 14, 2003, at 12:13  PM, Richard Ishida wrote:

>
>
> [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 Tuesday, 15 April 2003 11:43:58 UTC