Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Questions and discussion about B-Greek policies or the B-Greek forum.
Post Reply

Can you see the text correctly?

Yes
24
96%
No
1
4%
 
Total votes: 25

Nigel Chapman
Posts: 74
Joined: June 3rd, 2011, 4:55 pm
Location: Sydney Australia
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Nigel Chapman »

A minor tweak... Here's what the preceding post's examples looks like with 116% font size and 128% line height.

Image

The extra 1% in size makes a surprising amount of difference.
"When eras die their legacies are left to strange police." -- Clarence Day
Nigel Chapman | http://chapman.id.au
Jason Hare
Posts: 951
Joined: June 2nd, 2011, 5:28 pm
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Jason Hare »

That looks fantastic, Nigel!
Jason A. Hare
The Hebrew Café
Tel Aviv, Israel
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4158
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Nigel - I wonder what it would look like with just Didot in post bodies, and the current fonts in the subject lines. Yeah, I'd rather not modify people's posts automatically unless we have to, just in case we have to chase down a bug. I'd rather modify just the display if we can get away with it.

Here's a print sample of Didot that includes text in English, Greek, and some mixed text:

http://ctan.math.utah.edu/ctan/tex-arch ... ecimen.pdf

I'd like to see a screenshot of the same post in pure Didot, in the print size you chose.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Nigel Chapman
Posts: 74
Joined: June 3rd, 2011, 4:55 pm
Location: Sydney Australia
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Nigel Chapman »

Hi Jonathon -- 1.4em looks OK. You can also see here how I'm tweaking the page in-browser using Firebug to generate the screenshot.

Image

The downside of going all-Didot is that user-preferred fonts may conflict with the readability of the English body text. List members individually prefer different fonts; this is easy to support in the CSS if we can settle on a list and an order of precedence. But to take Ken Penner's experience as an example, while Gentium looks great for the Greek text, it's very poor as an English body font on screen. And even Didot is, to my eye, less readable for English text on-screen than the current sans-serifs, which seem to be liked. But if we style the Greek and English separately, we get the best of both worlds with (as yet) no downsides.

Then again, it's growing on me the more I look at it. -- Nigel.
"When eras die their legacies are left to strange police." -- Clarence Day
Nigel Chapman | http://chapman.id.au
Ken M. Penner
Posts: 880
Joined: May 12th, 2011, 7:50 am
Location: Antigonish, NS, Canada
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Ken M. Penner »

How does the Hebrew look in viewtopic.php?f=7&t=260&p=1074&sid=4f0a ... 63a6#p1064
I think Arial Unicode MS is the culprit, spacing the vowel points. Could we please place Tahoma before Arial Unicode MS in the font list?
Ken M. Penner
Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, St. Francis Xavier University
Co-Editor, Digital Biblical Studies
General Editor, Lexham English Septuagint
Co-Editor, Online Critical Pseudepigrapha pseudepigrapha.org
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3350
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Ken M. Penner wrote:How does the Hebrew look in viewtopic.php?f=7&t=260&p=1074&sid=4f0a ... 63a6#p1064
I think Arial Unicode MS is the culprit, spacing the vowel points. Could we please place Tahoma before Arial Unicode MS in the font list?
It looks like fine to me in Arial Unicode MS, but the example does not include the holam, which is the vowel point that fonts mess up (in my experience).

Stephen

(But I prefer Tahoma to Arial, anyway.)
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Jason Hare
Posts: 951
Joined: June 2nd, 2011, 5:28 pm
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Jason Hare »

Ken M. Penner wrote:How does the Hebrew look in viewtopic.php?f=7&t=260&p=1074&sid=4f0a ... 63a6#p1064
I think Arial Unicode MS is the culprit, spacing the vowel points. Could we please place Tahoma before Arial Unicode MS in the font list?
On my end, the Hebrew looks fine. The patach sorta touches the baseline of the ayin, but generally, it looks OK. (Then again, I'm kinda used to reading Hebrew without vowel points, so if I relied on the vowels they might be a little small. And personally, I don't really like how Tahoma places Hebrew vowels. At least on my end, Arial Unicode MS is much better with Hebrew than Tahoma.)

This isn't a Hebrew forum, though. If we set everything to GFS Didot, I don't know that the Hebrew text would show up at all. I'm all about Hebrew, but I'm not sure what everyone else thinks about the necessity of finding a font that supports it particularly.

Regards,
Jason
Jason A. Hare
The Hebrew Café
Tel Aviv, Israel
Nigel Chapman
Posts: 74
Joined: June 3rd, 2011, 4:55 pm
Location: Sydney Australia
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Nigel Chapman »

Jason wrote:
This isn't a Hebrew forum, though. If we set everything to GFS Didot, I don't know that the Hebrew text would show up at all. I'm all about Hebrew, but I'm not sure what everyone else thinks about the necessity of finding a font that supports it particularly.
Browsers keep a list of fonts in order of precedence; a character falls through them until it finds one that can display it. Every OS has a final, invisible fallback font which just shows the square with the four digits inside that you may have seen occasionally when Unicode wasn't otherwise working. Didot definitely will not supply Hebrew characters, so for better or worse the browser's default serif font will take over.

My preference would be to auto-detect the Hebrew character range the same way that we're considering for Greek, and specifically assign it some sensible fonts. I have no meaningful knowledge of Hebrew, however, so any advice on this would be appreciated. Nothing in the Google Font Directory covers the Hebrew character range, so embedding would fiddlier than for Greek; if something like Tahoma is dependable it may be the best approach at least on Windows.
"When eras die their legacies are left to strange police." -- Clarence Day
Nigel Chapman | http://chapman.id.au
Ken M. Penner
Posts: 880
Joined: May 12th, 2011, 7:50 am
Location: Antigonish, NS, Canada
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Ken M. Penner »

Nigel Chapman wrote:Didot definitely will not supply Hebrew characters, so for better or worse the browser's default serif font will take over.

My preference would be to auto-detect the Hebrew character range the same way that we're considering for Greek, and specifically assign it some sensible fonts. I have no meaningful knowledge of Hebrew, however, so any advice on this would be appreciated. Nothing in the Google Font Directory covers the Hebrew character range, so embedding would fiddlier than for Greek; if something like Tahoma is dependable it may be the best approach at least on Windows.
What is the problem for which Didot and JavaScript is the solution?
Who are the users who are experiencing problems? If they have a polytonic font already, let's just add that to the end of the font list. Or are we trying to fix it for those few OS's that don't come with a poytonic font? Windows Mobile? Blackberry? IPad? OSX before a certain version? Some forms of Linux?
Ken M. Penner
Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, St. Francis Xavier University
Co-Editor, Digital Biblical Studies
General Editor, Lexham English Septuagint
Co-Editor, Online Critical Pseudepigrapha pseudepigrapha.org
Ken M. Penner
Posts: 880
Joined: May 12th, 2011, 7:50 am
Location: Antigonish, NS, Canada
Contact:

Re: Having problems viewing fonts? (Call for Guinea Pigs!)

Post by Ken M. Penner »

sccarlson wrote:
Ken M. Penner wrote: It looks like fine to me in Arial Unicode MS, but the example does not include the holam, which is the vowel point that fonts mess up (in my experience).

Stephen

(But I prefer Tahoma to Arial, anyway.)
As an example of some typical problem areas, we could use תִּמְלֹ֣ךְ with a dagesh, holam, raised shwa in final kaf, and cantillation marks. How do the various fonts handle this?
Ken M. Penner
Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, St. Francis Xavier University
Co-Editor, Digital Biblical Studies
General Editor, Lexham English Septuagint
Co-Editor, Online Critical Pseudepigrapha pseudepigrapha.org
Post Reply

Return to “Questions”