Message from discussion Embedding fonts

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From: "Alan J. Flavell" <flav...@ph.gla.ac.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design
Subject: Re: Embedding fonts
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 23:37:41 +0000
Organization: University of Glasgow
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On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Gérard Talbot wrote:

> I think I found a way to go around this issue... sort of. You can 
> ask WEFT to analyze the webpage and then figure out the characters 
> which will be needed from which fonts.

Indeed you can, in fact that's how WEFT is *supposed* to work, but at 
my first attempt (with this Unicode range, which post-dates the latest 
WEFT version, 3, that I found) it hadn't seemed to be working. 

> > I've kludged up the following URLs, using material
> > from my normal unicode test area, to help in diagnosing the situation: 
> > http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/tests/unidata14.htm8
> > http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/tests/unidata15.htm8

Really, those are of no further use now, as they reference the
incomplete downloadable font which I was testing.  But if you still 
want to see how far I got...

> If you could change the file extension to html, I would try this 
> feature.

Sorry, I don't understand why that's a problem? "htm8" is just a local 
server convention for getting the server to advertise utf-8 encoding.  
Well, alright: try the same URLs ending in .html (which will be served 
with the page encoding advertised as iso-8859-1) or ending in 
.utf8.html , whichever appeals to you.  I've symlinked these 
alternative URLs in the /tests/ subdirectory.

But as soon as they have fulfilled this purpose I'd expect to remove 
them, as you have already achieved better results.

> http://www.gtalbot.org/DHTMLSection/AboriginalSerifDemo.html
>
> ABORIGI4.eot and ABORIGI5.eot are 25KB each and holding 19 
> characters each.
> 
> WEFT was able to analyze the webpage and then figure out the required
> characters from the Aboriginal Serif font.

Well done.
 
> On a different note, I downloaded Pigiarniq font from
> http://www.gov.nu.ca/Nunavut/English/font/
> and couldn't figure out where the Inuktitut characters were.

SIL Viewglyph shows them to be in their proper place, U+14xx and 
U+15xx, I'm relieved to say.  There's some other glyphs in the PUA 
(U+E002, U+E008, U+F7xx etc.) but your sample doesn't seem to make any 
use of them - which is good in terms of web compatibility.

> So I let Weft figure this out:
> 
> PIGIARN1.eot is 17.2KB
> 
> http://www.gtalbot.org/DHTMLSection/PigiarniqSerifDemo.html

So, both of your test pages are displayed OK here on Mozilla (when I 
have appropriate fonts available locally), and on IE6 using the 
downloaded font (even when I haven't got a suitable font available 
locally).  Good stuff.

If/when I get a bit of spare time, I'd like to understand why that 
didn't work for me, because you don't seem to be describing anything 
different than what I was trying myself.  But well done, anyway.  You 
going to write this up somewhere as a how-to?

cheers