[developers] Font defaults in web demo

[Joshua Crowgey]

One option which has crept up in the past few years is the ability to 
distribute a font file with your hypertext.

The method is to put an @font-face statement in your CSS:

@font-face {
     font-family: thisfont;
     src: url("path/to/thisfont.ttf");
     font-weight:400;
}

Then refer to the font-family as is typical in CSS styling:

<p style="font-family:thisfont">Text rendered in thisfont.</p>

Maybe this is a useful technique for linguists.  I think drawbacks would 
be that the font file is downloaded so if the file is very big, it could 
slow down your page rendering significantly.

--Joshua

On 11/12/2012 04:05 AM, Berthold Crysmann wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-11-09 at 15:25 +0100, Berthold Crysmann wrote:
>> Dear Stephan and others,
>>
>> the current version of the online web demo CSS style specifies some
>> default fonts (helvetica, arial, sans-serif) which are know for their
>> limited unicode support.
>>
>> For Hausa, in particular, I need composing diacritics and the so-called
>> hooked letters (ɓ, ɗ, ƙ) which are very poorly supported ion these
>> fonts.
>>
>> I would therefore like to suggest to keep these fonts as fall-back, but
>> to precede them with a reference to freely available Unicode fonts, such
>> as Charis SIL and Doulos SIL, which have good support for any latin
>> script. I have tested on MacOX X (with and without Charis SIL), Linux
>> (with Charis) and Windows XP (with Charis), and the results look fine.
>>
>
> DejaVu Sans also looks like a good candidate (good Unicode coverage,
> good combining diacritics, widely installed on Linux).
>
> If you want to inspect the issue, try
>
> "malam yana zuwa" in hag.linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr and regenerate.
>
> Berthold
>
>> I have further font suggestions that one may add, but Charis should be a
>> good bet, now it has even been chosen as the font to use for Coling
>> proceedings... Doulos may be installed laready on a good number of
>> linguist's PCs.
>>
>> In essence, adding free cross-platform unicode fonts as  overrides does
>> not hurt, but it fixes many situations where unicode functionality is
>> otherwise broken (Linux fonts without proper diacritic support, even
>> missing hooked letters).
>>
>> Looking forward to your comments.
>>
>> I attach my version of logon.css, which differs from the poriginal one
>> only in font-family specifications.
>>
>>
>> Berthold
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>