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

[Jonathan Robie]

Can you read polytonic Greek correctly on this site? Please vote so I have some idea how many people are having problems, and help me troubleshoot this if you are one of the people who has difficulty.

If these letters match the attachment, you are doing fine:

ἀ έ ῃ ϊ ὸ ῥ ϋ ᾧ

If not, please tell me:

1. What operating system you are using
2. What Web browser
3. Which of the following fonts do you have installed:

Palatino Linotype
Lucida Grande
Gentium
Abyssinica SIL

4. If none of these are installed - could you please install Abyssinica SIL http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page ... L_Download and tell me if that fixes the problem?

Sorry for the inconvenience to those who are having problems!

I'll repeat the test characters here to make it easier to compare to the attachment:

ἀ έ ῃ ϊ ὸ ῥ ϋ ᾧ

[Jonathan Robie]

Status: I think I may have improved things, but I also made the forum look uglier for anyone who has Abyssinica SIL installed and also has a better looking font that can do polytonic Greek. I've also lost shell access due to some issue with ibiblio.org, so I can't fix it right now - please excuse the ugliness in the meantime.

Currently, it tries fonts in this order: "Abyssinica SIL", "Gentium", "Palatino Linotype", "Lucida Grande", "Arial Unicode MS". So it tries Abyssinica first.

I *think* this would be a better order: "Gentium", "Palatino Linotype", "Lucida Grande", "Arial Unicode MS", "Abyssinica SIL". Anyone else have an opinion on this question?

[Louis L Sorenson]

On my windows 7 PC it appears fine.(Although now I am seeing different shaped characters - some larger than others. I did not see that before. But on my Android phone (v 2.2.2) with v2.2.2 browser, only the monotonic characters show up correctly.

[MAubrey]

I *think* this would be a better order: "Gentium", "Palatino Linotype", "Lucida Grande", "Arial Unicode MS", "Abyssinica SIL". Anyone else have an opinion on this question?

I'd prefer Gentium first too.

[Stephen Carlson]

I prefer a sans-serif font first. The Gentium just gets far too small and difficult to read.

ETA: Plus I'm getting a weird combination of Gentium in some places and Palatino Linotype in others.

[Jason Hare]

According to the forum's CSS file, it's showing the order thus:

Code: Select all

"Palatino Linotype", "Lucida Grande", "Arial Unicode MS", "Abyssinica SIL", Gentium,  sans-serif

So, everything on my screen is showing as Palatino Linotype. I'm with those who think Gentium should come before it. The English characters in Palatino Linotype are beautiful, but the Greek letters aren't as good looking (IMO).

Strangely, though, the textbox that I'm writing in now is displaying in Gentium. The CSS file has the textarea set to:

Code: Select all

"Abyssinica SIL", "Gentium", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif

This shows up as Gentium for me when I type, but when I post it turns to Palatino Linotype.

My opinion ::: Move Gentium up above Palatino.
What do others think?

[Jason Hare]

I prefer a sans-serif font first. The Gentium just gets far too small and difficult to read.

ETA: Plus I'm getting a weird combination of Gentium in some places and Palatino Linotype in others.

I would also prefer sans-serif for English letters, but it's hard to set apart the Greek without creating a tag for the forums.

On my own forum, I have a tag for Hebrew [he]שלום[/he], for Arabic [ar]سلام[/ar] and for Greek [gr]εἰρήνη[/gr]. These display the various languages with font-specific attributes, while allowing the normal text of the forums to remain sans-serif (I believe they're Verdana, but I haven't checked the settings in a while).

My forum: http://www.thehebrewcafe.com/forum --- Stylesheet: here

I've also embedded two fonts for Hebrew and one for Greek to go along with the tags.

Code: Select all

@font-face {
	font-family: "SBL";
	src: url(http://www.thehebrewcafe.com/fonts/SBL_Hbrw.ttf);
}

@font-face {
	font-family: "Ezra";
	src: url(http://www.thehebrewcafe.com/fonts/SILEOT.ttf);
}

@font-face {
	font-family: "GFS";
	src: url(http://www.thehebrewcafe.com/fonts/GFSPorson.otf);
}

I'm not sure if the phpBB software allows for the creation of tags, but the software I use allows for quick creation.

Jonathan - If I can be of any assistance, let me know.

Regards,
Jason

[Ken M. Penner]

I prefer a sans-serif font first.

On my system, the following sans-serif fonts cover the polytonic range:

• Arial
  Arial Unicode MS
  Calibri
  Consolas
  Déjà vu sans
  Microsoft Sans Serif
  Segoe UI
  Tahoma

(Windows 7, but some fonts might be from Office 2011)

[Jason Hare]

By the way, Palatino Linotype isn't so bad. So, if you want to leave it this way, it's fine with me. I'll deal with my issues. It's better than it was before. Thanks for even dealing with this! I tried to convince Jeff at Textkit that this was important issue, and he never seemed to think so. What can you do? I think he's a Unix user.

[Jason Hare]

Good news!!

I just read in the phpBB documentation that you can indeed create BBCodes to control text spans. This means that you can allow users on phpBB to see all English text in sans-serif (say, "Trebuchet MS", "Verdana", "Tahoma", "Arial", sans-serif -- or whatever combination you want) and designate Greek text in another set of fonts (say, "GFS Porson", "Gentium", "Palatino Linotype", serif -- again, at your choosing).

I'm not sure what exactly you could do on phpBB to write up this code, but it shouldn't be too difficult. Perhaps something like this:

Code: Select all

[gr]{text1}[/gr]
....
<span style='font-family: "GFS Porson", "Gentium", "Palatino Linotype", serif; font-size: 14pt;'>{text1}</span>

This should create a tag usable for encoding Greek text automatically. Users would just have to surround their Greek text with a small code.

Code: Select all

[gr]ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος...[/gr]

This would output the Greek text in a separate font from the rest of the forum's text.

What do you think?

Good luck!!

Jason Hare