On 8/30/05, James R. Johnson <modean52(a)comcast.net> wrote:
We've 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?
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