Not tyhe solution to this particular problem, but in general useful information: HTML markup codes
Looks good through FireFox 6.0, Opera 11.50, Chrome 13.0.782.215 and Safari 5.1 on a Mac running 10.6.8; does NOT look good through Mobile Safari on an iPhone running iOS 4.3.5.
I think a lot of this is related to what fonts are available to browsers. If the browser can handle the letters, but the system it’s on can’t provide appropriate glyphs for the letters, you’ll end up with substitutions or worse.
However, in the HTML 5 world, you can provide fonts with the web page.
Also, I’ve set all my stuff to default to Unicode, but if a page is marked as something else, they’ll do their best.
I can see them: http://i52.tinypic.com/2nw1ppk.png
Ubuntu 10.04
Firefox 6.0
Western (ISO-8859-1) encoding
As already noted, no guarantee everyone else will be able to.
Folks, enough with reporting your browser’s character encoding. It’s irrelevant, because (1) it’s going to be ISO-8859-1 for everyone, since that’s the encoding specified by the SDMB, and (2) in the source code of this page those characters are entered as numeric HTML entities, which allow the user to specify any Unicode character. I can guarantee you that nobody would be seeing the characters if they weren’t entered as numeric entities, since there are no runic characters in ISO-8859-1.
To give a possible solution to the OP’s question, though, if you can find a font which is free to distribute and which contains the characters you need displayed, then you can consider using Web Open Font Format to embed it in your web pages. WOFF is not yet a standard, but it probably will be adopted as such in the near future, and is already supported by recent versions of SeaMonkey, Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, and other web browsers.
Firefox 6 on Vista, boxes with R0 06, 08 etc in them.
Opera - just very small upright rectangles, empty.
Flock as Firefox, not unexpectedly.
Chrome, empty horizontal rectangles.
I bet they will work properly on the Linux machine when I can get to it.
Is part of the problem that the fonts mentioned by the SDMB style sheet (verdana, geneva, lucida, ‘lucida grande’, arial, helvetica, sans-serif etc.) don’t include the runic characters?
If so, then wouldn’t this work?
[ul][li]I find the most common fonts that include the runic characters, preferably fonts that are distributed with the Mac/Windows/Linux operating systems.[/li][li]I specify these fonts in the style sheet of my blog, or just before the special characters. [/li][li]Profit?[/li][/ul]
Even if this works, I don’t know how to find out what the best fonts would be.
I doubt it. If the font specified by the web page doesn’t contain the requisite glyphs, then the browser should render them using another font which does.
I doubt any common fonts include runic characters.
Well, on your own operating system, you could try typing the characters into a word processor, selecting them with a mouse, and then changing the font. But depending on your word processor, you risk it trying to outsmart you the same way most web browsers do by falling back to another font for the characters which aren’t available in the one you selected.
I really think your best bet is to use WOFF. It’s the only quasi-standard way of ensuring that glyphs are rendered exactly the way you intend for them to be. Failing that, if the glyphs don’t absolutely have to be text, then you can always render them as an image and embed that in your document with the <img … /> tag. If you use SVG, it will look almost indistinguishable from the surrounding text, and with the right CSS will even scale along with it. The only thing users won’t be able to do is to select and copy it as text.
I did some research, and apparently Chrome (and its open-source brother Chromium) have problems implementing this font fallback, which may explain why you and some others have reported that the text displays fine in some web browsers (indicating that you do indeed have some font on your system which contains runic characters) but not always in Chrome.
If you go to the Chrome/Chromium bug tracker and enter “font fallback”, you’ll get lots of open issues relating to these browsers failing to display glyphs from certain scripts. See for example Issue 516.
I’d look for a free webfont that has those characters in it, and then declare that as your main font. All the browsers can handle web fonts now, though older versions of Internet Explorer (below 9) will need a different type of font set as a backup.
Or you could use sIFR, which will use Flash to pull it off. Though you’ll still need at least one good web font if you want iPhone compatibility.
Thanks everybody for your replies, psychonaut in particular. This is more complicated than I thought. That “font fallback” bug must be behind at least some of the problems.
I couldn’t find any WOFF or webfonts that suit my needs. I found a few fonts with anglo-saxon and older futhark runes but not the Swedish/Norwegian ones included in the unicode set. Besides, it seems to be far more trouble than I think is worth. I’ve decided to stick with translitterations of the runic texts and if I need to show what it looks like I’ll just write it down with my unicode font and make an image of it. It won’t look as good and it won’t be scalable or searchable but it will have to do.
Again, if you make your image an SVG, it will indeed be scalable. You will need a drawing program (not a painting program) to do this; a good Free Software one is Inkscape. Just put your text somewhere on the canvas, select it, and export the selection to SVG, making sure you opt to export the text as a path. (Or alternatively, put your text on the canvas, issue the command to convert it to a path, then select the path and export it as an SVG.)
Works for me. But it’s not a matter of browser, it’s a matter of what fonts you’ve got installed, surely?
If you want it viewable by everyone, then just embed them as an image.
SVG sounds interesting and I will certainly look into it more. I tried Inkscape but it doesn’t seem to support the runic characters. I only got boxes when I tried. Same with Photoshop.
Just to try something that’s guaranteed to work I did a print-screen of a text and created a .png in Paint. You can see the results in my blog here. It’s ok for my purposes I guess, though the blogger software added some bluriness in the scaling (It looks ok if you click on the text).
If anyone else wants to have a go, my approximation of the text on this stone is:
᛬ᛚᛁᚢᛏᚱ᛫ᚢᚴ᛫ᚦᚱᚯᛏᛁ᛫ᚢᚴ᛫ᚯᚦᚢᛁᚦᚱ᛫ᚢᚴ᛫ᚦᛅᛁᛦ᛫ᛚᛁᛏᚢ᛫ᚱᛁᛏᛅ᛫ᛁᚠᛏᛁᛦ᛭ [ᚠᛅᚦᚢᚱ᛭ᛋᛁᚾ᛬ᛒᛅᚬᚱᚾ᛫ᚠᛅᛋᛏᛁ]ᚦᛁ᛬ᛘᚬᚦᚢᚱ᛫ᛋᛁᚿ᛬ᚮᚦᛘᚮᚾᛏᚱ᛫ᚱᛁᛋᛏᛁ᛫ᚱᚾᛆᛦ᛫
And BowlOfDucks, I really don’t think it has to do with what fonts you have available on your computer. I have checked my fonts now and I have at least 15 that can handle this unicode segment but Chrome won’t fall back on them, while IE and Firefox works great on the same computer.
Chrome doesn’t support them on my Windows box, but they display correctly on Chromium under Ubuntu.