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→My comments: re Richardguk: Thanks. I learn. Wow. Such reasoning should not be in a sub page. |
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:: — [[User:Richardguk|Richardguk]] ([[User talk:Richardguk|talk]]) 00:24, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
:::Thanks. I learn. Wow. Such reasoning should not be in a sub page. -[[User:DePiep|DePiep]] ([[User talk:DePiep|talk]]) 02:30, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
:::Firefox (for example) ''does'' do a pretty good job of finding glyphs among the installed fonts for characters it needs to display. The problem, even in this case, is that this font substitution may not be ideal. Let's say you come across several characters in the u+1f3xx range, fairly newly encoded and thus poorly supported. The font specified for the text does not support them, but you actually have two fonts installed that do. The browser substitutes FontX's glyph for the first one and FontY's glyph for the next. Hooray, you can see them, problem solved—right? Not if the font characteristics and design are wildly different. They look odd together. What you didn't know is that FontY contained both symbols. By specifying FontY for all, e.g., "astronomy" characters, you get a consistent appearance that is more pleasing.
:::Nobody is saying this template needs to be used in all situations. I actually recommend against that. If you have a one-off occurrence of a rare character, sure, just rely on the browser's font-substitution capabilities. (Even that may not be necessary. Following the previous example, if the "astronomy" character used is u+2600, the default font probably supports it. No need to substitute because it's not missing. Specifying a different font than the default would, in this case, actually be counter-productive.) As long as it doesn't display as the "missing character symbol" it's good enough. Maybe I never said explicitly, but part of my reason for initiating this was because I wanted to rectify some of the jarring font substitutions I've noticed. I follow Unicode, and fonts. These are areas in which I can contribute a bit on WP, so perhaps I tend to come across these situations more than most editors do. It just ''looks bad'' when the em size and x-height are jumping around all over the place, and style of glyphs is inconsistent.
:::Also, please note that I'm not following a range- or block-based approach for character support. Very early in this discussion I had considered that, but I'm not convinced it's the best idea. I'm well aware that many fonts do not provide coverage for entire blocks. Trying to provide that comprehensive support "piecemeal" as we're attempting here is not going to be simple. Even surveying the handful of fonts I have, for the couple dozen character groups I have, I know it's tedious and imperfect. Yet I think the result is still beneficial. ⇔ <span style="font-size-adjust:0.54; font-family:'P22 Declaration Script','American Scribe','National Archive', Ovidius, 'Ovidius Script', Horizon, 'Final Frontier Old Style', Charcoal, Virtue;">[[User:ChristTrekker|ChristTrekker]]</span> 14:55, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
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