On 8/30/05, James R. Johnson modean52@comcast.net wrote:
We've been discussing switching the accented characters in theOld English wikipedia to macrons, and I was wondering, why does the accented æsc character look so odd and out of place in the titles of articles?
I believe this is just a font issue. The default sans-serif font for Windows, Arial, appears not to have good support for Latin Extended-B Unicode characters.
With Firefox on a vanilla Windows XP installation, the aesc-with-macron looks somewhat fainter than other characters. With IE on the same machine, the aesc-with-macron doesn't even render for some reason.
With Firefox on Fedora Linux, there's absolutely no problem: two aescs are identical except for the accent.
Microsoft seems to have tried to fix this somewhat: they have a new font, Arial Unicode, available with Office 2002 and later. They have instructions for installing it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q287247/.
I followed these instructions and installed the font. After selecting Arial Unicode as my default sans-serif font in Firefox, I see no difference between macronized characters and others. One catch, however, is that italicized characters don't look as good as they do in normal Arial.
Steve