Current support for N'Ko

[dzo at bisharat.net]

Peter, The "weird trick" in the HTML font command to get it to display 
on IE 8 was "serif." When I first posted (having copied over text from a 
Word document with formatting - another in the list of not so good 
practices), some N'Ko text showed but most was empty boxes. On looking 
at the HTML in Blogger, I found that the visible text was where the 
span/font command included serif after DejaVu Sans. Anything without 
"serif" - including DejaVu Sans alone - produced the empty boxes. 
Probably the generic serif command let the system find another font?

Wrt IE 11, I will have to go back to that computer. Actually it was in a 
public library - not a bad way to get an idea of how a random system 
might see content in a script like N'Ko.

(This also brings to mind a policy-related item on computer systems in 
countries where diverse scripts are used: That on various levels, 
incentives or regulations should be in place mandating inclusion of 
relevant fonts to facilitate display of languages/scripts in the 
country. Back in 2008, I had the experience of not being able to display 
extended Latin characters of Bambara on new Windows systems in the 
business center of a major hotel in Bamako, Mali. I'm quite sure that 
most computer systems in hotels, cyber cafés, government offices, and 
the few schools that have them in that country, will not be able to 
display N'Ko or Tifinagh properly, even if extended Latin is by now more 
widely supported.)

Don





On 29-09-2014 17:10, Peter Constable wrote:
> Don,
> 
> You mention testing IE 8. That's a 5.5-year-old version that shipped
> before N'Ko script was supported on any platform. It's interesting
> that anything worked. You also mentioned IE11 on Windows 7 but testing
> without the Deja Vu fonts. Windows has supported N'Ko since Windows 8.
> Did you try testing with that and using the Ebrima font?
> 
> Btw, the text appears to display correctly on my Windows Phone.
> 
> 
> Peter
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of 
> dzo at bisharat.net
> Sent: Friday, September 26, 2014 8:11 PM
> To: unicode at unicode.org
> Cc: charles.riley at yale.edu
> Subject: Current support for N'Ko
> 
> Some observations concerning N'Ko support in browsers may be of
> interest:
> 
> http://niamey.blogspot.com/2014/09/nko-on-web-review-of-experience-with.html
> 
> This is pursuant to reposting a translation in N'Ko of a World Heath
> Organization FAQ on ebola. That translation was one of several
> facilitated by Athinkra LLC, and available at
> https://sites.google.com/site/athinkra/ebola-faqs
> 
> Don Osborn
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