Barnie De Los Angeles wrote:
> Even after studying the Unicode web site for a while I am not able to
> find a solution for this issue.
>
> The task is to include accented cyrillic characters (vowels
> only) into
> russian html. (Vowels are accented or "stressmarked" in Russian for
> educational purpose.)
>
> My html pages are always utf-8 encoded.
>
> "Pre-accented" Russian vowels obviously do not exist as Unicode
> characters of their own.
>
> I only need one kind of accent. Its Unicode number is
> probably 0301 and it is called "accent" or sometimes
> "stressmark".
>
> The remaining question is how to "combine" this accent with a
> vowel, or: how to get that dammed stress mark 0301 on top of a
> character?
You simply put the accent character *after* the letter character. Either
character can be encoded directly (e.g. in UTF-8) or with a numerical
reference:
аÌ
а́
аÌ
а́
The fourth notation should work independently of the page encoding, while
the other three require a charset declaration by your server, or inserted in
the <head>...</head> section of your file:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
The visual result depends on the font installed on the computer of people
reading your page. The typical results are:
1. Two rectangles: no font supports Cyrillic or combining marks;
2. A rectangle with an accent on top of it: the font supports
combining marks but no Cyrillic;
3. A Cyrillic "a" followed by a rectangle: the font supports
Cyrillic but no combining marks;
4. A Cyrillic "a" with an accent too high on top of it: the font
supports Cyrillic and combining marks, but it is not a "smart font" (the
accent is so high in order to also fit on a capital letter);
5. A Cyrillic "a" with an accent on top of it, placed at a correct
height: the font supports Cyrillic, combining marks, and it is a "smart
font".
As an author, what you can do to try and force result 5 (or 4, at least) is:
- Specifying that that piece of text should use one of commonly
available fonts that fit your needs, in order of preference. You can do this
with a Cascading Style Sheet or with the <font> tag. E.g.:
<font face="Code2000, Arial Unicode MS, Arial, Times New
Roman">а́</font>
To do this, you must make some assumption about the kind of
operating system(s) used by your users, and know which fonts are commonly
available on those computers.
- Adding a link to a help page (written in English and/or with
Russian text included as a picture) which explains to users how they can set
up their computers to have the proper font support.
- Doing nothing. You have done your part, encoding the page
correctly, so let the users do their homework too.
_ Marco
