Steve,
This is now the second time that I’m writing this post. I got nearly finished with it about five minutes ago, and then the computer/tablet (Surface 3) froze on me. Since I was writing it on the browser, everything that I wrote was lost. I’m starting over, so I hope that this isn’t missing anything that I had already thought through and composed and simply don’t have the strength to write again. Old age… it gets all of us one day or another.
(1) “Assyrian” isn’t the name of a font, as far as I know. I think the author of the page was simply designating a font for embedded use. This is why he (she?) was using
@font-face, which embeds a font on the page.
panose-1 is an obsolete descriptor for
@font-face. The page isn’t well written for this and other reasons. There is no font file associated with the
@font-face to tell the system where to pull the font in order to embed it. This means that it’s just pulling from the default font that you happen to have on your system. If you didn’t have a font that contained the glyphs for Syriac, it wouldn’t display the characters – but it would simply place squares where the characters were supposed to be. The page itself defaults to “Times New Roman” (which doesn’t have the glyphs for Syriac) and “Serif,” which would include the “Estrangelo Edessa” font mentioned before (if you have it on your system) or any other serif font that contains the appropriate glyphs. I know that it defaults to Times New Roman and Serif because the paragraph bodies contain the
.MsoNormal class, which has the following design:
Code: Select all
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {
margin: 0cm;
margin-bottom: .0001pt;
text-align: right;
direction: rtl;
unicode-bidi: embed;
font-size: 12.0pt;
font-family: "Times New Roman", "Serif";
}
(2) It wasn’t a
great idea to tag your Syriac with
[heb] tags. It would have been better to have an [rtl] and then use a [size] tag, as you’ve done. Why? The [heb] tags stylize the text with “SBL BibLit” and “SBL Hebrew,” which – though they are amazing fonts –
obviously do not contain the necessary glyphs for Syriac. It’s just a waste of a tag, except that it has the right-to-left designation. That’s the only benefit of that tag to your Syriac: that it makes it larger (which you said you also did by the addition of the
[size] tag) and overrides the normal text direction.
If we want to really support Syriac on the forum for all modern phones, tablets and computers, we would need to embed it in the stylesheet server-side. This means uploading the font (probably Estrangelo Edessa) to the website and embedding it in the global stylesheets for the forum. I’ve had limited success doing this with some fonts on my forum. For a while, SBL BibLit embedded perfectly – on all of the systems that I checked it on. Then, suddenly, it stopped working. It shows up on my computer (which has SBL BibLit), but it doesn’t show up on my phone, even though it’s embedded.
Either way, we can just hope to make it available for as many people as possible. Maybe someone who knows better than me can really make it work cross-platform.
I just checked on font availability. I wasn’t aware that Estrangelo Edessa was a for-sale font from the Microsoft Corporation, but it apparently costs $49 (
source). I thought it was free, since it’s always been on my system.
That would certainly be the first font in the family. I’m not sure what font is used on Lynix or on Mac to display Syriac. Mac default fonts, as far as I know, display
everything.
I would wonder, though, if it’s absolutely necessary to define fonts for display for Syriac. Either it’s on the system or it’s not. I’d just suggest making the font-size bigger and using a Unicode bidirectional tag.
Code: Select all
<span style='font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%; direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: bidi-override;'>…</span>
Something like that. The font family will take care of itself on most systems.
What do you think?
Jason