Font problem between Mac and PC

Phonetic Font Problem between Mac and PC in browser

[wolf]

I am a webmaster and me and my colleagues are working with a phonetic font (with special characters) named SIL Sophia 93. We use both Macintosh and PC. This is the problem we have right now:

- When we open a Macintosh HTML-document in a PC-browser, the SIL Sophia-font is not the same as on a Macintosh: some characters are replaced by others. All characters are phonetic ones, but not always the same ones as in the Mac-document.

- When we open a PC-HTML-document on a Macintosh, a similar problem occurs: the phonetic character is replaced by a space or a non-phonetic character, often resembling this: " .

I wondered if anyone recognises this problem and if s/he knows a solution...

Bye! And thanks!
Wolf

[DrDoc]

Welcome to Webmaster World!

Have you defined which charset to use?

[wolf]

you mean in the <font> tag? Yes: the name of the font is specified: if the HTML-document is made on a Mac it is perfect when viewing it in a Mac-browser. Same thing for a HTML-document made on a PC and viewed in a PC-browser. It is just when you look at the Mac-document in a PC-browser that there are problems (or vice versa: looking at PC-document in Mac-browser).

[Purple Martin]

No he doesn't mean in the <font> tag, he means the charset ;-)

For example:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

More info available here:
[w3.org...]

[wolf]

OK, thanks... I will check that asap (I don't have the documents on my computer here, but on another one).

New question: is it possible to put a font on a server and refer to this font in your webpage? (In a font-tag or something.) In this way, the user doesn't need to have the font installed on his computer...

[TryAgain]

It's still possible in IE (I think) but embedding fonts has long been abandoned.

[DrDoc]

has long been abandoned

Not so... But they were never able to agree on a standard for the dynamic font :)

[wolf]

Putting the font on the server would be the perfect solution for phonetic fonts (because they have these 'weird' characters and the fonts are not standard on a computer). So... I just read it is not really abandoned... this means that I can do it? Insert a tag in my documents that refers to a font on the server? Is it possible and if yes: how? ;-)

I appreciate everyone's help very much!

Desperately yours,
Wolf :-)

[TryAgain]

Microsoft hase a program called WEFT to embed fonts on webpages.
[microsoft.com...]
This will only work in IE.

I just noticed they have an updated version now, after a hiatus of two years, so I guess it's not abandoned after all. :)

NN uses something called TrueDoc.

Here's a webmonkey tutorial on embedding fonts (which actually uses embedded fonts btw).
[hotwired.lycos.com...]

I tried WEFT once and it all worked nicely. It's (a lot) extra work though and if the page (or text that uses an embedded font) get's updated you will have to update the font file as well.

(Opera 7 displayed the embedded fonts in the webmonkey page, Mozilla 1.5 seemed to ignore them.)