I think the key here is, when using Windows, what version of Uniscribe
you are using, not the browser (also, it may depend on what font you
are using - some fonts have opentype tables for diacritic positioning,
others don't).
Multiple diacritics display fine for me in Hebrew, I can use the
Nafees Nastaleeq font (for Urdu), bn.wikipedia and ml.wikipedia are
rendered properly (bo.wikipedia renders properly in an edit window,
but not viewing).
One problem is that FireFox doesn't allow the degree of control that
IE does where assigning specific fonts for specific Unicode ranges is
concerned. Instead, it seems it selects automatically whatever the
first font it finds that supports it at all (Arial Unicode MS
"supports" Tibetan, but it doesn't really - it should preferably use
Tibetan Machine Uni or as a secondary choice TibetanUchen). And if a
page has a language header, it will use that and ignore any specific
font tags on the page - try viewing
http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/
in FireFox (make sure you have Chinese fonts installed first, or you
won't be able to replicate this) and rather than displaying in a nice
Roman font like Tahoma like it should (and does in IE), it displays in
the default Chinese font. This is annoying, because although it is
readable, it is EXTREMELY ugly and a bit difficult to read fluently.
I would expect with FireFox that I could have even better control,
perhaps even by entering custom unicode ranges and then selecting the
fonts to use for them (IE is limited to a list of Unicode ranges,
which doesn't include all of them).
Mark
PS
Speaking of people simply not knowing, I got my mom using FF, but she
switched back after it gave her problems - her job at the time
required her to log in to the same website with multiple IDs at the
same time. I asked many different people how to do that, I did what
they said, but nothing worked. But in IE, it's very easy. And it
seemed like people were like "Oh, did you try this? Didn't work? Oh
well." which can hardly be a good thing for FireFox.
On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 04:07:19 -0500, Olve Utne <utne(a)nvg.org> wrote:
Hello Gerard M.,
On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 08:52:03 +0100, you wrote:
Just saying that Firefox is better is plain stupid
when the argument
IS that it does underperform. [...] So I am fully aware why there is a
such a strong case for IE and against Firefox when used with Farsi and
propably Urdu, Arabic and Hebrew.
I agree, and I can confirm your suspicions regarding Hebrew. I have tested
recent versions of Firefox and Mozilla with Hebrew, and neither of them can
handle complex Hebrew text with combined diacritics and cantillation marks.
I believe it is a case of varying degrees of support for glyph-substituting
in complex combinations. Opera is best on this, with IE as a good #2. A
problem with Opera in Windows seems to be that it corrupts pictures when
downloading them from Wikipedia. Therefore, I personally use Opera for most
things, and IE when needing to download Wikipedia images.
(Another problem with Opera is that it is in some ways less up to it when
it comes to CSS than IE is. In that respect, Mozilla and Firefox does a bit
better than Opera, but they are both actually outperformed by IE when it
comes to scrollbar properties, block-align by css in table cells, etc.)
That does not by any means mean that I am particularly fond of IE...! It is
just that it is one of the two Windows browsers I know of that can actually
handle Hebrew properly. Not because I am stupid or uninformed, but because
I need something that Firefox and Mozilla (and sometimes also Opera) do not
in fact provide.
-Olve
___________________
Olve Utne
http://utne.nvg.org
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