Dear Henry,

At DO we have always used preferred precomposed characters, and the rendering is always equally good on the PC and Mac (or at least as good as the architecture of the font invoked). When trying the opposite convention—combining diacritics—I run into shoddy typography, again on both systems. Much depends upon the tables built into the font itself and experience tells me that many type foundries put alignment of base and combining characters toward the bottom of their priority list—again, a phenomenon not unique to one platform. As for the unpleasant boxes, I find these are frequently the fault of the font-substitution algorithm used by the software (most notoriously MS Word, easily rectified once you know the secret handshake).

For your digital publication have you looked at all into WOFFs?
http://www.w3.org/Fonts/WOFF-FAQ.html

As I understand it, WOFFs are now seen by the major players as type-delivery standard preferred over EOT and raw TTF/OTF files (often invoked through @font-face). One major advantage of WOFFs is their higher compression, and therefore better performance. And best of all you can decide on the typeface to use, and lend your publication some unity, rather than leaving it to the caprices of the user's system.

Hope this helps,
jk
--
Joel Kalvesmaki
Editor in Byzantine Studies
Dumbarton Oaks
1703 32nd St. NW
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 339-6435

From: Henry Francis Lynam <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Reply-To: The Digital Classicist List <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 09:58:01 +0000
To: <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Subject: [SPAM - Header] - [DIGITALCLASSICIST] CSS and Greek Unicode Fonts - Email found in subject

Hi folks,

I am looking for some advice on the best CSS font-family value for displaying Greek Unicode text. I am using combining diacritics - by this I mean that the standard diacritic marks (acute, circumflex, grave, iota subscript, rough breathing, smooth breathing, diaeresis) are separate Unicode characters that come after the character they modify.

For example, to encode an alpha with a rough breathing and a circumflex, I would encode the following in my HTML UTF-8 output:
\u03B1 \u0314 \u0342
(remove the spaces and \u to get the actual Unicode output)

On the Mac in all browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome), this displays the correct combined diacritic. But on Windows PCs, I don't get perfectly formed characters - the accents tend to be printed a bit to the right or left of the character. In some cases, the dreaded square boxes appear for my combining diacritics.

Here is my CSS entry that covers the Greek text I output:
font-family: sans-serif;

As a comparison, the Perseus site uses:
font-family: "New Athena Unicode", Gentium, "Palatino Linotype", "Lucida Grande", Galilee, "Arial Unicode MS", sans-serif;

So, I have two questions:
1. What are best practices for the CSS font-family entry for Mac and Windows?
2. Do sites use combining diacritics for their Greek Unicode (like above) or are they using precomposed (composite) Unicode characters that already include the diacritic?

Thanks for the help.
Henry.

Henry Lynam
Department of Classics
Trinity College Dublin