RE: Commonly used fonts for multiscript CSS

Richard,

I have a problems with the concept of font-family for i18n work.  If you
encode in Unicode then you can not use a single font or font-family.  This
is especially true of Han characters which you have no idea how to render
unless you know the language of the viewer.

It would be more useful if you cold have something where by you could have a
set of style sheets and a language relation system where you do not have to
provide for all possible languages but that the browser can pick the best
fit.

At times you have to make more than just font changes.  Some fonts may not
render well at the same point sizes or should not be bolded.  It is also a
nice to have to be able to pick culturally pleasing colors.

I can dream can't I.

Carl



> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-international-request@w3.org
> [mailto:www-international-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Richard Ishida
> Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 11:13 AM
> To: www-international@w3.org
> Subject: 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 Tuesday, 15 April 2003 12:45:00 UTC