Why is Liberation Sans in the list? The version I have has no coverage of the Greek extended block.
Sorry, that was my mistake, I'd misread the Wiki page for Unicode fonts on Free/Libre systems, and didn't notice my system was falling back to another face.
I've just been through the fonts in the Insert > Special Character in Libre Office... The Linux sans-serifs fonts with Greek Extended are: DejaVu Sans (+ Light, + Condensed), Ubuntu (sugg. Light) and FreeSans. Except for Ubuntu, these also have the "Basic Hebrew" block. And FreeSans is the nicest, though like all of them it needs some extra leading. So the Linux font-family I'd pick would be:
Code: Select all
font-family: "FreeSans", "DejaVu Sans", "Ubuntu";
These are sufficiently unique that they can go first in the list after the user-preferred faces. the only issue is whether DejaVu Sans will take priority over Tahoma on Windows. On page 1 of this thread, Ken spelled the Windows name of DejaVu Sans as "Déjà vu sans" -- was that correct? If they are named differently then the precedence issue disappears, otherwise we move DejaVu after Tahoma.
How to order the Windows and Mac faces is a problem: Lucida Grande is the system font, in full Unicode, on Mac but -- apparently? it was reported in this thread -- not on Windows, while Tahoma (like all the MS Core Web Fonts) exists on Mac and so will take precedence over Lucida Grande there. Lucida Grande has 233/233 of Greek Extended, but both Lucida Grande and Arial MS Unicode have only 82/87 for Basic Hebrew, according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_typefaces (thus Arial actually has more Hebrew than Arial MS Unicode). On thinking it through, we can just stick to the common sans-serif web fonts for Windows and Mac, which, limited by Greek Extended and Basic Hebrew completeness, are Arial, Microsoft Sans Serif and Tahoma. Could someone compare these side-by-side on Windows and select an order of priority?
My compendious CSS specification would thus be:
Code: Select all
.postbody .content { /* Utilitarian Serifs */
font-family: /* Linux */ "FreeSans", "DejaVu Sans", "Ubuntu", /* Windows + Mac */ "Microsoft Sans Serif", "Tahoma", "Arial", /* Fallback */ sans-serif;
font-size: 1.35em;
line-height: 145%;
}
.greek { /* Or just fall-back to the sans-serifs in .postbody .content */
font-family: "Gentium", "Galatia SIL", "GFS Elpis", "GFS Didot", "GFS Bodoni", "Aisa Unicode", "Athena New Unicode", "Cardo", "SBL Greek", "Palatino Linotype", "Times New Roman";
font-size: 116%;
line-height: 145%;
}
.hebrew { /* Or just fall-back to the sans-serifs in .postbody .content */
font-family: "Ezra SIL", "SBL Hebrew";
font-size: 116%;
line-height: 145%;
}
Notes:
- Someone with better Hebrew knowledge will need to check the .hebrew fonts list, I've just googled some academic recommendations.
- Very ambivalent about including SBL Greek in .greek, but that's personal taste.