Re: 9.228 phonetic & other fonts on the Web

Christopher G. Fox (cgfox@rci.rutgers.edu)
Thu, 19 Oct 1995 16:41:08 -0400

From: "Richard L. Goerwitz III" <richard@mithra-orinst.uchicago.edu>

> There is a quick and dirty method to display ANY font on the WWW, but it
> has some drawbacks. If you can get a fixed-width (non-proportional)
> TrueType version of the font you want, then Windows and Mac users using
> Netscape (and maybe some other graphical browsers)....

This is an absolute kludge, and strictly to be avoided. Everyone recog-
nizes that HTML is absurdly restrictive when it comes to character sets,
and everyone realizes that some sort of multilingual facilities will have
to be added. This is being done for version 3.0. In the meantime, try
not to be impatient. And, for heaven's sake, don't try some kludge that
will only work on Macs or peecees that have specific fonts.

If the glacial pace of the standards committees doesn't satisfy you, and
you want solutions now, here are some ideas about who to write to, to
try to speed things up:

1) to the maker of your browser (they need to know what customers want),
e.g., drop a note to mosaic@ncsa.uiuc.edu (if you use Mosaic) asking
when you expect multilingual facilities to be included

2) to the chairman of the IETF HTML Working Group eric@spyglass.com

3) join the HTML discussion group by dropping a note to
www-html-request@w3.org asking to be signed up, then start posting
queries asking about "other" languages, IPA, etc. and HTML

Also, take a look at the draft internationalization standard,

ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-html-i18n-01.txt

If you want to kill two birds with one stone, then write to the maker
of your browser and ask when they expect to have ISO-10646 support
built into their browser, as per the above draft. ISO-10646 is a
character encoding scheme that provides the raw codes we all need to
get the world's major languages up on the Web. It probably also has
IPA symbols (I haven't checked).

--

-Richard L. Goerwitz *** *** r-goerwitz@uchicago.edu