When I used Arial Black to write text, I found it didn't work in Chinese, so I wondered if there was a way to determine whether a font would support Chinese or not
A general note about fonts:
not all font contains all glyphs. So it's expected that you can not use a single font for the whole Unicode range. You should first find the font that meets your visual requirements and contains the glyphs. Many font families have several specifications for the different Unicode ranges. You should first find the font that meets your visual requirements and contains the glyphs. Many font families have several variants for the different Unicode ranges. It is best to contact your font vendor to get the right font file. Or you can use free but very complete font families, such as Noto.
Of course you can check the glyph availability in a font with PDFlib. This is demonstrated in the PDFlib cookbook topic glyph availability:
gid = (int) p.info_font(font, "glyphid", "unicode=" + t.character);
Based on this, you can determine if a font contains the glyphs you need. Please see also the PDFlib 9.3.0 Tutorial, chapter 6.6.2 "Font-specific Encoding, Unicode, and Glyph Name Queries" for details.
Also related to your question, you might check the technique of fallback fonts for chaining multiple fonts to get a larger set of glyphs. Please see PDFlib 9.3.0 Tutorial, chapter 6.4.6 "Fallback Fonts", as well the included starter sample starter_fallback, which is also available in the PDFlib cookbook.
I have try 'int error_font = p.load_font("Arial Black","", "replacementchar=error");
as soon an exception occurs, you can not longer use the PDFlib Object. Please see PDFlib 9.3.0 Tutorial, chapter 3.1.1 "Exception Handling" for details on this important topic.
You find the PDFlib 9.3.0 Tutorial within all PDFlib Download package within the "doc" directory, as well on the PDFlib 9.3 Download page as separate link.
Related
I am making an application, and I want to add a "HOME" button.
After much struggling with various icon libraries, I stumbled upon this site,
http://graphemica.com/%F0%9F%8F%A0, with this
đźŹ
A unicode symbol, which is more akin to a letter than an image.
I pasted it into my HTML, and it just workedTM.
All this seems a little too easy, though. Are unicode symbols widely supported? Is there some kind of problem with them that leads people to use icon libraries instead?
It depends on what do you mean for "safe".
User should have the fonts, so you must include the relative font, and in various formats: there is not yet a format recognized by most used web-browsers.
Additionally, font with multiple colours are not fully understood by various systems, so you should care about what do you expect from users (click, select, copy, etc.).
Additionally, every fonts has own design, so between different fonts (so browsers and operating system) things can look differently. We do not have yet a "Helvetica 'Home'", a "Times New Roman 'Home'".
All this points, could be solved by using a web font, with monochrome glyphs (but it could be huge, if it includes all Unicode code points (+ usual combinations).
It seems that various recent browser crashes if there are many different glyphs, but usually it should not be a problem.
I also recommend aria stuffs so that you page could be used also by e.g. readers (and braille screen).
Note: on the plus side, the few people that use text browser can better see the HOME (not the case in case of an image), if somebody still care about this use case.
Some things you want to make sure you’re doing:
Save your HTML file as UTF-8. In fact, save all text files as UTF-8 unless there’s some reason you can’t.
Put the line <meta charset="utf-8" /> near the top of your HTML file.
Make sure your server isn’t misconfigured to tell all browsers that webpages are in the wrong encoding.
If, somehow, it is and you can’t fix it, fall back on &entities;.
Specify a font stack for your emoji in CSS with a set of fonts that cover nearly every system, perhaps including Apple Color Emoji, Noto Color Emoji, Segoe UI Emoji and Twemoji.
If a free font such as Noto or Symbola contains the emoji you use, you can package it as a WOFF to be sure it will always display the way you want. (As of 2018, Tor browser does not show most emoji correctly by default, but mainstream browsers do.)
I think using unicode is a good practice for development. Beacause The unicodes are essentially part of your operating system so you don’t need any special library or plugin and you treat them like regular text.
The only problem is - code can be defficult to read or understand. I think it is not easy to understand that (ㇼ 8;🏠) printing home icon.
Even the 8 bit PNGs are faster then the font icons.
Image icons can be lightweight but still slow down your site with another HTTP request and time for the image to load. With images you don’t have flexibility over the color and scaling. SVG vector image alternatives are still not faster than plain-text (Unicode characters). Unicode doesn’t require additional HTTP requests and can be made to scale nicely.
If you are developing a website using only simple shapes, you can use unicode UTF-8 symbols as replacement for font icons.
I think :
Almost every developer use libraries for icons because of readablility of code, Easy to use and get more options.
Safe or Not
I can not say whether it is safe or not.
Because Unicode contains such a large number of characters and incorporates the varied writing systems of the world, incorrect usage can expose programs or systems to possible security attacks. This is especially important as more and more products are internationalized. This document describes some of the security considerations that programmers, system analysts, standards developers, and users should take into account, and provides specific recommendations to reduce the risk of problems.
Read about UNICODE SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS
Here are few precautions to be taken while doing that, I did some research and found this to be more helpful for your question. Also I dont know how you can do but credits go to Mr.GOY
Displaying unicode symbols in HTML
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 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'm building a quiz that support 20 languages.
One is Maldivian.
How do I support this. Right now I'm having a bunch of square.
I want to know:
- What font should I use.
- Is there an online translator for English-Maldivian? (google translate do not support this)
Maldivian uses the Thaana script, which is not very widely supported in fonts. There are two basic strategies: specify a font-family rule that lists fonts known to contain Thaana letters, hoping that the user has at least one of them installed, or use a downloadable font with #font-family. The latter sounds more realistic in this case. For it, you would need a font that you can legally use that way.
Free fonts that support Thaana include MPH 2B Damase and TITUS Cyberbit Basic.
For generalities, see my Guide to using special characters in HTML.
I would be very surprised at seeing an automatic translator for a small language like Maldivian, and I would also be surprised at seeing an automatic translator that produces decent results when translating a web site.
My company has created GraphPad Prism, a widely used program for scientists to analyze data and make technical graphs. Often scientists will export graphs from GraphPad Prism for submission to scientific journals. The format most journals want these days is EPS, and we export vector-based EPS files. But fonts are an issue.
We offer an option to "embed" fonts into the EPS file. What we mean by this is that text is converted to outlines or glyphs. These EPS files can be opened on other computers that lack the original fonts. But the journal production people can't edit the text, change font size, etc. when they work on these EPS files.
My programmers tell me that the term "embedding fonts" means exactly what we do -- convert to outlines/glyphs.
The people at a company that does page production for many scientific journals use a different definition of "embed". They want text to remain as text in the EPS file, but for the font definitions to be included in the EPS file. That way they don't need the original fonts, but can tweak spelling, font size, and even change fonts while preparing an EPS image for publication.
My programmers tell me that that second definition of "embed" is an Adobe-specific method not available to us.
So my question is this: Where can we find specifications or example code to let us embed fonts into an EPS file using the second definition (leave text as text and also include the TrueType font definitions)?
"My programmers tell me that the term "embedding fonts" means exactly what we do -- convert to outlines/glyphs."
Your programmers are, in my opinion, mistaken. In the print industry embedding fonts means embedding the font data as a font, not a series of vector linework. There are good reasons for maintaining fonts; file size, rendering performance, character hinting, drop-out correction etc.
"My programmers tell me that that second definition of "embed" is an Adobe-specific method not available to us. "
This is definitely not true and hasn't been since about 1990. The PostScript Language Reference Manual describes in some detail how to create fonts of many kinds, the 'black and white book' (I can't remember the name offhand) describes how to create quality type 1 fonts. The various tech notes from Adobe describe how to create fonts with type 2 (CFF) and CIDFonts with outlines of any of the preceding types.
You can also use 'type 42' fonts, which are essentially TrueType outlines. These are not quite the same as TrueType fonts, but they are very similar (the actual glyph descriptions are the same). It seems to me that this is what you want.
You can get an example of TrueType font inclusion by printing a document which uses TrueType fonts to a PostScript printer on FILE: under Windows, but you may find the code hard to follow.
Type 42 fonts are described on p346 of the 3rd edition PLRM, "Section 8.4.2 Type 42 fonts (TrueType)"
More detail is provided in Adobe Tech Note #5012 "The Type 42 Font Format Specification" This document (and many others) is available in PDF format from the Adobe web site.