LL-L: "Fonts" LOWLANDS-L, 22.AUG.2000 (08) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 22.AUG.2000 (08) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Andy Eagle [Andy.Eagle at t-online.de]
Subject: LL-L: "Fonts" LOWLANDS-L, 20.AUG.2000 (05) [E]

Sandy wrote:

> Subject: "Alphabets"
>
> I've been trying to find an HTML code to represent the
> Scots letter "yoch". This is rather like a cursive "z"
> with a tail. I've tried the extended HTML character set
> with no success - I tried Greek letters, and tried various
> sizes and styles of subscript and superscript 3 but none
> look any good!

I had exacly the same problem with my website (www.scots-online.org) vis a
vis yogh and IPA symbols. Some could be represented with the HTML codes e.g.
eth ð etc. For others I also had to resort to gifs.

> Finally, I resorted to doing it as a little GIF (go to
> http://scotstext.org/Factual/Sermons/yuletide.asp and
> search for "brul" if you're interested in seeing what
> I'm aiming for). This looks fine, except that it's not
> easy to get a descender when combining text and graphics
> like this, and besides, I'd also like to be able to italicise
> it, so it would be much better as an actual HTML character.

Mixing graphics and text has its problems. I may make the graphics the same
size as the text is displayed on my computer, but if others have different
settings then it doesn't work (as well). You could try putting the text
without yogh in a table field <valign = "top"> and the yogh graphic in
another. That way the text and yogh gif could be aligned to suit the top of
the text. The tail would then hang below the text line. Probably more bother
than it is wotrth.

> Is anyone working with Scots aware of a character code that
> would make this possible? Considering how multinational the
> web character sets are supposed to be these days, I can't
> help thinking that this must be available, but just hasn't
> been included on standard lists!

The only other possibilities are unicode or Dynamic fonts (DHTML). Though
once again, with unicode, if users don't have the unicode fontset on their
computer they only see standard characters. Dynamic fonts are a bit more
complicated. http://www.letteror.com http://www.hexmac.com
http://www.bitstream.com (I can't vouch for these URLs).

Andy

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