Russian font question

[TIMOTHY BEASLEY]

As an aside to font discussions.

At UCLA we're starting to work with "dynamic fonts".  Dynamic fonts
require Netscape 4.0 or Internet Explorer 4.0 (or above), and strike me
as pretty new.  We're at the experimental stage, but it's at least a
partial solution to the fonts-on-the-Internet problem.  Every undergrad
course has a web page, and--of course--the computing staff hit Big
Problems with fonts (but they were warned.....).

You take your font of choice (Glagolitic, let's say), and convert it to
a portable format (using licensed software).  You refer to this file in your
html, causing Netscape or IE to download it.  The page is properly
displayed, as are other pages (until the disk cache is cleared).  The
fonts are only temporarily installed (and only for the Web browser's
benefit.).  I've been told that they print properly as well, but
haven't tried that yet.

While there's the added overhead of the browser having to download an
80-130 kb font file per font per session, and only IE 4.0/Netscape 4.0 (or
above) currently support dynamic fonts, it's certainly better than making
sure every first year Russian student has the proper font set on his/her
computer.

If we ever finally get set up and running, we'll probably wind up having a
publically available set of dynamic fonts and font information that I'll
forward to seelangs.

(Now if somebody could tell me how to send e-mail in *Cyrillic*  between
PCs and Macs using Pegasus mail......)

Tim Beasley
grad student
UCLA Slavic Languages
HCF Grad Technology Consultant