If you take a bit of text that contains emojis from whatsapp web, and paste it into facebook messenger, you'll get different versions on each platform. How does each platform use their own images as placeholders for emojis? Please note that the emoji code is preserved when copy-pasted. So a melon on one platform will still be a melon on the other platform.
I'm not even sure this is a programming question, if not I'd be very grateful if you could point me to the right direction :)
Emoji are represented as unicode characters that individual platforms and apps can interpret as they see fit. While most modern platforms will automatically translate the unicode character into the appropriate image, some apps will override this behavior and replace the platform-standard unicode character with their own image.
text.replace("{unicodeEmojiString}", "{eitherAMarkerOrImageSpecificToMyApp}"
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I developed an app (originally in Korean and English), but I want to add Chinese support.
When I move the Chinese translations from Word to FlashDevelop, though, some characters show up as boxes. When I run the app, they don't show up at all.
Does anyone have experience developing in multiple languages using the same IDE, or preferably, FlashDevelop?
Thanks!
You need to check the file encoding and check if the font you are using support this kind of character. If you use transformation like rotation and alpha, you need to embed your font. For french, I need to convert my file to UFT-8 and embed the font with accentued character.
I have a javascript application, that converts text in runes using the Unicode rune chart. The problem is, that some fonts do not contain the rune symbols.
Mozzila Firefox simply finds out the correct font and uses it for runes, instead of Goudy Medieval and Times New Roman. Google Chrome is not capable of doing that and displays black boxes instead of runes.
So my question is:
How can I find out which web-safe font supports these symbols?
Can I find which font does Firefox use at any point of the document?
Re. 1.: Use a character map program. (On Linux, use e.g. gucharmap, where you can search for the character, and by right-clicking on it (and holding), you can see the font used. You can also switch to other (non-default) fonts in the program and see if the character is present in that font too.)
Re. 2.:
Highlight the text whose font-family you want to determine.
Right-click and select Inspect Element.
In the Developer window that should open, on the right hand side, there should be a Rules column with a bunch of CSS rules. You'll usually have to scroll to the bottom there, and somewhere in there you should find the applicable font-family (inherited or custom-specified) list of which fonts to preferably use.
Compare this list (which may be a single item) with the list of fonts installed on your system. The first matching font between that list and what you have installed would be what Firefox is using.
Use a font-manager program (on Linux this might literally be "font-manager") to get a list of fonts installed on your system.
if rune is an open type font ligature, you can view the font's open type features a few ways....microsoft typography has a free tool u can download, install, then right click on an open type font, some new tabs will appear with the usual ones...one of them is properties. click on that guy, it'll have a list of all the features.
you can also use photoshop, i know if you select an open type font as the text in use, you can then view it's open type features. here's some images of exactly how to do it...sorry for the quality, these are from CS4: http://dev.bowdenweb.com/css/fonts/accessing-open-type-features-in-photoshop.html
so that's how you can tell what features they offer. i'm not sure if runic is a feature itself, or just a design term....that said, quick google search and "Junicode" is a medieval font with the "Junicode is an advanced Unicode font for medieval scholars, including the full range of characters for languages written in the Latin script" http://www.filewatcher.com/d/FreeBSD/8-stable/sparc64/junicode-0.7.6.tbz.1331504.html
but maybe your heart is set on your font....i can't find alot about the rune chart, sorry. you can search the entire open type font features list....i know microsoft typography has it listed, as does adobe...but neither are great for searches, and i'm also not a fan of their naming conventions, which confuse me even more.
I have a bunch of HTML documents that contain some simple text in Windows-1252 encoding, but throughout the text there are numerous appearances of span elements with font-family: Symbol.
For example:
<span style='font-family:Symbol'>Ñ</span>
Which appears as the greek delta - Δ in the browser.
Google told me that using the Symbol font might show different results on different systems, as it's not actually a well defined font.
Is this really true? Is it "unsafe" to use the Symbol font?
If so, is there any way to reliably convert (on my own system) such symbols in the Symbol font to their Windows-1252 counterparts?
It's been always unsafe to rely on having certain font installed on all the computers/smartphones/gadgets that visit your site. There're some font embedding techniques that work reasonably well in some modern browsers but you'd need to repack the Symbol font and I doubt the copyright owner allows you to do it.
Of course, most characters in the Symbol font are not in the Windows-1252 encoding but that should not be an issue. You can use the following map to obtain the appropriate HTML entities. However, you'll have to write a script or program using a programming language (HTML is just a markup language).
When using font-family, if neither of the listed font faces are found on the client, that is without the webfont embeds, may result in changing to default font of client hence a different font replacement for what you'd show to your users.
You may want to use UTF-8 encoding and put the delta (Δ) sign in your HTML content, or use webfont embeds to provide an option, "use the font I want from this".
The problem is that the greek letter you see is just the appearance, the actual letter is something completely different.
I can think of two ways to convert it:
1. Write a script (in your language of choice) that converts each letter to it's Greek counterpart. (Ñ => Δ)
2. Take a screenshot of the document/page and use an OCR-program to convert it to Greek text.
I have a web app in which a user can change the font family of an input text area in a WSIWYG-kind style. Now, let's say the user inputs some Chinese text in the text area, but selects a Font that has no support for Chinese characters. In my application, I'd like the user to see those nasty squares (or something like that) that are usually shown when the font doesn't support the character. That way, the user would know that the font doesn't support the language and could choose a different one. The issue I'm having is that the browsers (Firefox 17 and Chrome 23) seem to render the Chinese part of the text with fonts (as Arial) that do support those Chinese characters, making the user believe that the font he's trying to use works fine.
Is there a way (I'm guessing through CSS) to prevent this? Is there a way of making the browsers not to be so "nice" for only this time?
Thank you in advance.
As the other answer already explained, the solution is to use a fallback font which includes 'all' unicode codepoints. However the difficult part was to find or built one which doesn't weight a few MBs.
A few years later there is now a more lightweight solution for a fallback font, the NotDef font by Adobe. It shows a box with a cross for 1,111,998 Unicode code points, is only about 22Kb and is using the SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.1.
If you don't want to show anything there is also the Adobe Blank font.
You can intercept the font substitution process by throwing in a catchall font, using some equivalent of font-family: userChoice, yourCatchAll where yourCatchAll is a font that has a generic glyph for all characters.
The problem is in finding such a font. The LastResort font distributed by the Unicode Consortium would be ideal, since it also visually indicates the category of the character in broad terms, but its EULA does not seem to allow modifications. It is debatable whether this applies to the construction of web font formats (like .eot and .woff).
The Unicode BMP Fallback Font appears to have more liberal rules of use, but it displays a character simply as its Unicode number in a box (and supports only Basic Multilingual Plane, though it contains all characters that most people ever heard of).
I need to decide whether to render geometric symbols in a web GUI (e.g. arrows and triangles for buttons, menus, etc.) as Unicode symbols (MUCH easier and color-independent) or GIF/PNG files (lots of hassle I would like to avoid).
However, I have seen clients that have trouble displaying even advanced punctuation symbols declared as unicode characters (Example).
Does anybody know from which version on, OSs / Service Packs / Applications ship with Unicode versions of the standard fonts? There is, for example, Microsoft's Arial unicode that ships with Office since 1999, however I do not have office installed and still my Arial has at least some of the Unicode range.
Also, what is the situation with Mac OS and Linux?
Could somebody point me towards some comprehensive resources on this - reports, lists, overviews?
There's not really such a thing as a “Unicode version” of a font(*). “Arial Unicode” is a misleading name: it's not materially different to normal “Arial”, it just has some more characters in it. It does not contain usable glyphs for every single one of the tens of thousands of characters defined so far, and indeed there is no one OS standard font that does.
The significant question is merely whether the characters you want to use have glyphs in the default fonts of commonly-deployed operating systems. You need to look to look at font support for particular characters you wish to use on an individual basis.
The character U+0360 Combining Double Tilde you mentioned is not really ‘advanced punctuation’, it's an curious and rarely-used diacritical mark for phonetics work. So it's not really surprising that font support for it is poor. On the other hand, Stack Overflow can get away with using U+25CF Black Circle (●) because lots of fonts have it. Some of the other characters from the Geometric Shapes block such as U+25B2 Black Up-pointing Triangle (▲) are also pretty common.
fileformat.info has a list of common fonts that support each character, so you can check there to get a feel of how widely supported a symbol is, and whether the default OS fonts you recognise are present, before using it as a replacement for an image. For example U+25CF is in many fonts, but U+0360 isn't that well-supported: none of the default Windows install fonts are there, and the ‘Libertine’ font renders it badly wrong.
(*: OK, there is sort of such a thing as a Unicode font, in that a font's internal character lookup tables may be denominated in Unicode or some other character set. However this makes no practical difference as the application will always be addressing it as Unicode; the OS will do the conversion on lookup transparently.)
This question may be a duplicate of Unicode and fonts where I posted a list of unicode font links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category%3AFree%5Fsoftware%5FUnicode%5Ftypefaces
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode%5Ftypefaces
http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/index.htm
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fontsbyrange.html
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html
http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/
http://www.wazu.jp/index.html
However, I am not sure how the Unicode standard defines how to render a stand-alone COMBINING DOUBLE character, as it is supposed to combine other characters.
Some random observations:
On OS X the Unicode support is perfect, at least for your needs.
On Windows the situation seems to depend on the browser. I don’t use many arcane characters, but the few I do (mostly punctuation) seem to display just fine in Firefox. The only problem is in Internet Explorer, as usual.
If you have some control over your clients you could distribute some good free fonts?
Even web fonts could work.
One drawback to Unicode charactes is that they are often quite ugly. Too big, too small, have wrong position, etc.