I recently bought a font and wanted to embed it into my website using web fonts.
Now the problem is: After buying it, I realized that the font is missing the umlauts, such as ä, ü and ö, so it shows an empty space instead of the (missing) character.
Is there a way to prevent this? Like tell the css to use another font for the missing characters? Or would I have to edit the font itself?
Because there is no "easy", or clean way around this except remodeling the font files, here's a small JS script to replace extended ASCII chars with a <span>. (One could only do this for the exact, required characters, but you'll propably end up asking yourself the same question again once you accidentally come across another character that's not supported.)
JS only on example text:
"Hêllo wörld. ÄÖÜßäöü".replace(/([\x80-\xff])/gi, '<span class="arial">$&</span>')
Result:
H<span class="arial">ê</span>llo w<span class="arial">ö</span>rld. <span class="arial">Ä</span><span class="arial">Ö</span><span class="arial">Ü</span><span class="arial">ß</span><span class="arial">ä</span><span class="arial">ö</span><span class="arial">ü</span>
jQuery:
$('.webfont').each(function(){
this.innerHTML = this.innerHTML.replace(/([\x80-\xff])/gi, '<span class="arial">$&</span>')
});
The nodes with .webfont should only contain text, although it should also work in most other cases.
There is no acceptable way to prevent this. Use a different font. (It is possible that there is an extended version, with higher fee, of the font you bought.) The font should be selected so that it contains all characters, at least all letters, that you may need in the text.
It is possible to use different fonts for different letters in a word, using various techniques (#font-face with range settings being the most elegant, but with limited browser support). However, it means a typographic disaster. Especially if the text contains e.g. both “ü” and “u”, there is usually a striking mismatch.
Editing the font itself is technically possible using a font editor, but normally illegal unless permitted in the font license or in exemptions to copyright in applicable legislation.
Related
I generate web-page by Razor and sometimes browser show me question marks instead of one random unicode character.
For example:
I think, this question mark is displayed in place where the first byte of two-byte unicode character is in the one tcp-package and the second byte of character in the other tcp-package. But why browser does't paste them correctly?
All files encoded by utf-8. There is <meta charset="utf-8">.
Update
Question marks dependent on page content. If I change content before question mark, it may disappear or move to other place (replace other character)
Encoding the characters in UTF-8 encoding scheme is not the only thing you should consider while working with encodings. Font family also plays a great role in this thing for rendering the correct graphics for all of your characters; characters are after all just glyph drawn by graphics. Unicode takes care of all of the bytes (1, 2, 3, 4 which ever size) of your characters and shows the correct character on your screen; if your framework or font-family supports the glyph.
In your website, the font-family; probably a custom loaded, does not support this character, (or the code page to be more specific) that is why browser has to fall-back to display a question mark. You're also saying that the character is randomly chosen, so that defines the problem, for being a font-family based problem. I would advise that you try out your application in 'Segoe UI' font-family and see if that works; because that probably would work.
Apart from my suggestion, please make sure that the font-family does support that code page where this character exists. Otherwise, it will display a question mark.
I'm searching for a method to tell the browser to render each glyph rendered with a specific font, e.g. FreeMono, in a bigger font size than glyphs rendered with other fonts. The reason for that is, that I use characters like ᚠ in a website and these glyphs are rendered using FreeMono in Chrome (see inspect element → computed → rendered fonts) and they look always like they're to small to fit the surrounding text. Is there any way I can do that?
You cannot. CSS has no tools for such font-specific tuning, apart from the font-size-adjust property, which has very limited effect, limited browser support, and buggy support.
If you use a character such as “ᚠ” U+16A0 RUNIC LETTER FEHU FEOH FE F on a web page, then it will be up to each browser in each system which font (if any) is used to render it, at least if you do not explicitly suggest some font(s) that contain it. It may be FreeMono, but most computers in the world do not have it. Besides, in FreeMono, “ᚠ” is rather large—taller than uppercase Latin letters. So if it looks too small, the reason might be a mix of fonts.
To make, say, Runic letters match the style of other text, you should try and find a font that is suitable for both—so that you can use a single font, designer by a typographer to make things fit. You would then probably need to find a suitable free font and use it as a downloadable font (with #font-face). It might be FreeSerif or FreeSans; only in very peculiar circumstances would I consider FreeMono, a monospace font, suitable for rendering computer code in some cases and mostly unsuitable for everything else.
I have a font I want to use on my website. I live in a country where we use characters like "š,ř,č,ž,ě" and so on. I need those characters. When I open up Photoshop and use my font, it works with these (latin-extended I guess) chars without a problem.
When I use Font Squirrel to generate the #font-face, I set it all up to include almost every character possible. Still, in the character demo they provide in the download, the special-encoding characters are missing.
What could be the problem? Any solutions? I'm 100% sure the font supports the chars, but it seems Font Squirrel disregards that support. Or I'm setting something not the way I'm supposed to. Any alternatives? Thanks!
So, I know that this isn't something that is normally a good idea for a website, but I have a special purpose/intent for such a use:
I have a multilingual dictionary that I'm working with online, where I need one of the languages to be in a specific font, from a file that I specify locally. However, I want this language to be rendered ONLY in this font, as if it is rendered using any other font, it will render incorrectly. That's all fine and dandy, and I can load the file in CSS and whatnot.
But I want to make it so that if it can't load that file, either for one reason or another, or something goes wrong, it can't go to another font. Basically, render this text using this font, and if you can't do that, don't just try and render it with Arial or whatever is the default -- show me blocks, show me a stark something.
I've spent a bit looking around, but am not sure what in CSS I would be using for this. Suggestions/help? Thanks :)
As an update to this question, since April 2013 there exists the Adobe Blank Font, which can be used for that purpose.
You may build a cross-browser css with FontQuirrel WebfontGenerator and the Adobe Blank font files.
If you just need the font in OpenType format you can use this single css file with the already embedded font
You can't do this. Text is text and text has to have a font that it is to be rendered in. If you really want, there's probably some weird JavaScript function that can detect the actual font being used for the text and if it doesn't match the one you want, then you can hide it or something. But in the end, your only option is to have the text displayed in some obscure font, or completely hide the text. If the text is visible, it has to be rendered using some font.
You could also theoretically create your own font where all the characters are just blank, but that seems highly illogical and such a waste of resources to make people download a font just so it can display meaningless emptiness.
There is no "don't render fonts" option. It's a font, it needs to be rendered, or else it's hidden visually in the DOM.
You could use Javascript to find out the font being applied to a certain block, and if it's not the font you want, just hide it. Or display a message.
Another solution is somehow specify the content to be empty. For example, I'm trying to override the +/- character that a Webix tree displays using Font Awesome:
#lhn-tree-container .webix_tree_open:before {
content: '';
}
This only works with the :before and :after pseudo-elements though.
This week we stumbled upon a rather odd bug in IE7 (surprise, surprise) when embedding a EOT font file using the #font-face construct.
To save on bandwidth, we often edit out sets of characters from a font that we know will not be used on a site. In this particular instance, we were using this font for headers that were all composed in title case, but displayed in uppercase using the text-transform property. Logically, we saved all our font files with only the uppercase characters, as we simply don’t use the lowercase.
The site rendered perfectly in every browser (including IE6 and IE8) that supported the #font-face construct, with the notable exception of IE7. IE7 only displayed the first character of each word in the proper font — the rest of the characters were displaying in the browsers default font.
Scratching our heads, we finally figured out that since the headers were actually written as title case (and therefore contained lowercase characters), even though the text-transform property was deployed and characters were appearing in uppercase, IE7 required the lowercase letters to exist in the EOT file to display the uppercase characters. (Intuitive, isn’t it?)
The simple fix was the rebuild the EOT file with both upper and lowercase glyphs, even though the lowercase characters are never used.
Problem online: http://www.testdomeinnaam.nl/mike/
How can I fix this properly? (i.e. make IE7 render the uppercase characters without having to include lowercase glyphs in the font.)
Thanks!
I think you already have the best fix - just include both uppercase and lowercase glyphs in your .eot.
Your server is using HTTP compression.
The current .eot is 22.62 KB, and it's compressed down to 13.87 KB.
Even if adding the uppercase glyphs doubles the size, it would still only be ~28 KB compressed.
Unless there's a simple "actual fix" to the problem, just stick with this.
Is it an option to transform the case on the server-side? For example, php has this: http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtoupper.php
That might fix your IE7 problem, if it's practical to use such a function.
a just had the same problem and solved it quick:
for ie7 to render the font correct with text-transform "uppercase" it's enough for ie7 that the lowercase-letters are defined in the font file, they don't need to contain real letters = they lowercase-letters in the font-file can be empty and the size of the font does not increase.