On 18 Apr 2005, at 11:54 am, John Horner wrote:
I'm working on this website for a charitable organisation:
http://www.lienhoatemple.org.au/vi/index.html
and I don't know what it looks like to you, but in my browser (FireFox 1.0 Mac) the Vietnamese characters which should be bold or italic are coming out as plain.
It's only the Vietnamese characters it happens to, i.e. characters which are also found in French, like a-acute or e-circumflex, appear fine, it's only the ones with the special Vietnamese diacritics which don't display properly.
I'd be interested in any light anyone could shed on this...
Safari (1.3) does the same. IE Mac has even more serious problems.
Of course, the fonts you use (Georgia, Verdana,...) do not contain those glyphs, the browser goes looking at whatever fallback it can find on your system. If you have a real Vietnamese font installed, it might work better, although FF Mac has loads of problems with East Asian fonts. I have that problem often with special Japanese characters, even with the correct Japanese fonts available.
Even then, a next problem is, does that font contain glyphs for bold or italic ? If not, the browser might attempt to interpolate (Firefox) or not (Safari, Opera 7.5). And for those special characters, more often than not FF doesn't interpolate.
For both FF and Safari, it might help if you specify 'Lucida Grande' as the first font-family (sans-serif). I'm not aware of any trick for sans-serif. And using shorthand (font: bold 1em/1.3 'lucida grande', verdana, sans-serif).
Here is a little experiment done for Japanese text.
<http://dev.l-c-n.com/safari/japanese.php>
(and it appears that Safari 1.3 tightened the rules even more, not sure if it is a bug or what, haven't investigate that one yet).
Some more reading matter:
<http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/2005/04/ bitstream_vera_not_for_me_thanks.php>
Philippe ---/--- Philippe Wittenbergh now live : <http://emps.l-c-n.com/> code | design | web projects : <http://www.l-c-n.com/> IE5 Mac bugs and oddities : <http://www.l-c-n.com/IE5tests/>
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