problems with cyrillic o line when using a Mac

[Don Livingston]

I highly recommend SIL's Gentium script for dealing with accented Cyrillic letters.  They have a version specifically prepared for Mac OS X (and nine, I believe), and also versions for Linux and Windows which I have successfully used.  The font contains non-spacing diacritics which I regularly use.  The font can be found at:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium_download

One thing to bear in mind if you wish your text to be readable by others in html on a website is that the reader generally must have a font installed on his system that contains the necessary symbols, and it's best to construct your html in such a way that it directs the browser to use specific fonts that will have those symbols before using ones that doen't have them.  For instance, if I want my readers to view non-spacing diacritics on my blog, I can include the following bit of code in the html "head" section of the web page:

<style type="text/css">
body { font-family:  Gentium,"Arial Unicode MS","Times New Roman",ClearlyU, serif ; }
</style>

This directs the browser first to use the Gentium font, or if that's missing use Arial Unicode MS, then try Times New Roman, then ClearlyU, then the standard system serif font.

A couple notes on the fonts:  Gentium is a glorious font for print.  It's not rendered as nicely on screen as on the page; it's still my first choice for this kind of thing.  Arial Unicode MS is an enormous and fairly complete Unicode font that includes non-spacing diacritics.  In MS Office 2003 the Times New Roman font contains them as well.  ClearlyU is distributed on many Linux systems and also has them.  Therefore this bit of css code should provide multisystem ability to read non-spacing diacritics for most users, provided only that they have installed one of the relevant fonts on their computer.

Installation instructions for Arial Unicode MS are still available at

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;287247

All the best, Don Livingston.

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