Hello all,
Weve been discussing switching the accented characters in the Old 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? Two examples:
http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C5%AB%C3%BE_betw%C4%93onan_%C3%BE%C7%A3m_R%C 4%ABcum
versus: http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BA%C3%BE_betw%C3%A9onan_%C3%BE%C7%BDm_R%C 3%ADcum
And the two Halloween articles:
http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ealra_H%C3%A1lgena_%C7%BCfen
versus: http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ealra_H%C4%81lgena_%C7%A2fen
Typically, Old English is written nowadays with macrons, but they look a bit odd on the aesc character. If anyone knows why, please let us know.
James
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
On 01/09/05, Stephen Forrest stephen.forrest@gmail.com wrote:
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.
I may be wrong, but I have a feeling Firefox can try to fill in missing characters from other fonts, whereas IE just ignores them; so the faint character is being pulled from some other Unicode font somewhere on your system. [Or something like that, I don't know the mechanics]
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org